Research On Elaine Showalter’s Feminist Literary Criticism

As an important representative figure of the English and American feminist literary criticism, Elaine Showalter advocated in "patriarchy" as the center of the traditional literature to build women’s own independent literary history and literary tradition. With the emergence and development of the western feminist literary criticism, the lack of theory foundation has been the soft rib of feminist literary criticism, Showalter recognized this soberly so she had put forward the theory of "female" textual concepts creatively. She focused on exploring women literature which was neglected for writing their own literature, thus female subculture had been established. With the development of the era Showalter realized that its initial theory was insufficient, thus she put forward the "double discourse" theory which claimed that women literature couldn’t be independent of the mainstream culture. In the two kinds of traditions she emphasized the female literary criticism and writing that were involved in predominance and silence.In consideration of the important influence of Showalter criticism theory, this paper is to study feminist literary criticism theory of Elaine Showalter as the breakthrough point,and try to analysis its criticism theory carding through the four parts so as to the further study. Firstly, we studied the historical background and theoretical roots of Showalter’s theory of criticism so that we can get a more comprehensive understanding on the criticism theory. The most part of Showalter’s theory of criticism was the view of academic research Angle, literary criticism characteristic connotation and theoretical explanation which is very important to understand Showalter’s theory of criticism. The third part is the rational analysis of achievements and shortcomings of Showalter’s theory which is for using Showalter’s theory of criticism more scientific dialectically in the future. The last part detailed Showalter’s theory of criticism’s impact of literature and literary in the United States and China.Through analysising and summing of the critical theory, we try to get its deeper theoretical connotation, and through the development of this theory and the actual situation of Chinese literature development we thought about the influenced factors of Chinese women literature and literary criticism, so that we found the feasible developping direction of the traditional Chinese female literary criticism. Showalter’s feminist literary theory of criticism developped mainly by the regression of women as a whole to the individual, and the new concept of harmony becomes possible.