Study On The Thought Of Elaine Showalter's Feminist Literary Criticism

Elaine Showalter's academic career started from 1970s,and she is still active in the forefront of feminist literary criticism.She published many works,which can be divided into two categories.One is to establish the theoretical system of "female criticism",the other is using her "feminist criticism" to explore the history of women's literature.She pays attention to women writers and their literature works,and tries to construct female literary tradition.She has discovered a large number of female writers who have been neglected,and analyzed their theory on literature creation.While studying female works,she saw the unfair treatment to women's works by standards of traditional criticism,and the value of their works has not been confirmed.On the basis of this,she put forward her own "female criticism"theory,and clarified the relationship between the theory of "gynocritics"and "feminist critique".Showalter's theory of criticism absorbed many kinds of criticism theory and method of twentieth Century and explores women's situation from the perspectives of society,history and culture.It uses Psychoanalysis to explore female writers' psychology,and analyzes the changes of feminist criticism from roles of women in literature as writers and readers.In the field of feminist criticism,Showalter's criticism is both broad and in-depth.Her research methods are also very diversified.This paper attempts to analyze the development of Showalter's criticism theory in detail,with a focus on the process of Showalter's construction of female literary history and literary criticism,tries to find out the challenges she encountered,and her responses.