Feminist Criticism

Feminist criticism is a movement in literary studies that examines literature through the prism of gender: it exposes patriarchal stereotypes in the depiction of women, revises the canon, recovers forgotten women's names, and analyzes the specificity of 'women's writing.' Its classic works are Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' (1949), Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own,' Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's 'The Madwoman in the Attic,' and Kate Millett's 'Sexual Politics.' The French branch (Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous with the concept of écriture féminine, Luce Irigaray) joined feminism with psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. Feminist criticism grew into broader gender and queer studies. In Ukrainian literary studies it is developed by Solomiia Pavlychko ('The Discourse of Modernism in Ukrainian Literature,' 1997), Vira Aheieva, and Tamara Hundorova, reconsidering the work of Lesia Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska.