"The New Feminist Criticism" brings together for the first time the most influential and controversial essays on the feminist approach to literature. These groundbreaking essays by well-known critics offer a much-needed overview of feminist critical theory, and illustrate its practice. In "The New Feminist Criticism" the authors take up a variety of topics. They challenge received notions of literary tradition and shows how women's writing has been systematically excluded, misread, and misinterpreted. They address the relationship of women's writing to ethnicity, separatism, and feminism itself. And they ask how it differs from that of men, with regard to recurrent images, symbols, themes, and plots. Complete with a bibliography of feminist literary theory, "The New Feminist Criticism" is an indispensable introduction to one of the most important intellectual movements of recent times. -- From publisher's description