Literary theory is a generic term usually modified by a specific emphasis (for example, Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist) that refers to theories of reading and of what constitutes the literary.
Although reading has never been unmediated by theory, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that literary criticism was gradually replaced by the highly contested discourses of critical theory. Literary criticism—which begins with Aristotle’s Poetics—up until the 1960s was largely regarded as an adjunct to reading, an academic enhancement of a transparent process. Beginning in the 1960s, Anglo-American literary theory shifted from a formalist preoccupation with literary works as discrete objects of study to a contentious debate about the production of meaning, about what difference it makes who is writing or who is reading, and about the effects of various axes of difference, including race, class, gender, sexuality and history. This radical shift was due to two major factors: the critique of the university and its practices of knowledgeformation launched by the US New Left and women’s movements; and the translation into English of a wave of European critical theorising that included work by Althusser, Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Jauss, Lacan and Levi-Strauss. In relation to men and masculinity, feminist literary theory is most relevant. Literary theory at the beginning of the twenty-first century draws upon a vast array of disciplines and discourses, including linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, anthropology and history. Furthermore, literary theory is now more commonly identified as critical theory to indicate that the notion of the ‘literary’ has been superseded by the ‘textual’ and now encompasses a much broader range of cultural artefacts (e.g. film, advertising, mass media, popular culture as well as elite literature).
In the United States, women’s studies instigated a re-thinking, or what Rich called a re-visioning, of the literary canon. Among several possible candidates for the ur-text of feminist literary theory, Millett’s Sexual Politics is most frequently identified. Millett’s readings of male authors (Lawrence, Miller, Mailer, Genet) established a political reading of their fiction that sharply differed from the received ideas of the dominant New Critical ways of reading, which bracketed off literary works from considerations of context, class, race or gender. Millett analysed instances of sexual description to reveal the power dynamics in texts that she argued were reproduced in social institutions that maintained men’s dominance over women.
This first stage of feminist literary theory focused on the recovery of a neglected female literary tradition with the aim of adding women writers to curricula and anthologies. Biographies and critical works on women writers were produced as context for the republication of many neglected femaleauthored works. An inevitable concomitant of this emphasis on sexual difference was the identification as masculine of norms that the dominant critical tradition had represented as ‘universal’. Initially, an essentialist notion of sexual difference became a lens for reading, and so attention was devoted to the study of women’s representations of men and men’s representations of women, as well as to the gendered nature of reading (see Flynn and Schweickart 1986). As the essentialist model of opposed male and female natures was discredited, critical work began to be undertaken on the construction and representation of masculinity in literary texts. The canon of American fiction, in particular, was criticised as equating Americanness with being male (Fetterley 1978; Baym 1981) and with excluding women as both proper subjects of fiction and as its creators. Women as readers were said to be ‘immasculated’, i.e. trained to read as men (Fetterley 1978). In contrast to prevailing theories such as Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, writers like Baym, Fetterley, Gubar and Gilbert and many others argued that literature and literary theory privileged men by creating narratives of creativity that excluded women.
During the same period when women’s studies research was establishing the relevance and necessity of female-authored texts, a cluster of French theoretical writings from a variety of disciplinary perspectives were being translated into English and disseminated to profound effect in the Anglo-American academy. Several influential European thinkers drew on the structural linguistics of Saussure to argue that language is a closed system and that meaning cannot be ‘authorised’ by reference to anything outside a text. The work of adding female-signed texts to the canon was challenged by, for example, Barthes’s notion of the ‘death of the author’, and Foucault’s question, ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ (Foucault 1984:120). The question of reading as or like a man or woman became central in debates about literary theory in the US during the 1980s as the hitherto parallel tracks of feminist theory and French poststructuralism began to crisscross one another (see Culler 1982; Miller 1986). Some feminist critics (notably Showalter) were wary of what they saw as male critics’ opportunistic appropriation of feminist literary theory as it became a successful area of study and publication. The question of men’s relation to feminism was often argued in the context of literary theory in the 1980s as male critics began to produce feminist works, often prefaced by anxious justifications for their doing so.
Concurrent with these high-profile intellectual disputes, the work of feminist literary theory continued to revolutionise both what was considered worth reading and how that reading should produce interpretations. Many articles and books argued that critical approaches to canonical works were partial, at best, once the insights of feminist theory were applied; when the difference of experience of female readers was privileged, previously settled interpretations were refashioned. Duyftiuizen’s critique of a popular textbook’s account of Andrew Marvell’s widely taught poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a paradigmatic example of the kind of work done by both men and women in the 1980s as the canon was revised and expanded. Duyfliuizen revealed the cultural bias in the critical tradition that assumes a poet is a man speaking to men. He described a widely used and representative student handbook as ‘an allegory of initiation to masculine criticism’ (Duyfhuizen 1988:416). By positing a female student as the reader of Marvell’s poem, Duyfhuizen demonstrated the exclusion of her perspective in commonly accepted interpretations.
The encounter between what was in the 1980s often termed in the US ‘French’ theory and ‘American’ feminism (a distinction that was not tenable for long) resulted in a shift away from a focus on sex difference per se in favour of an analysis of gender as a social construction and of the complex interplay between texts and the interpretive choices involved in the reading process. In a landmark collection of essays, Abel wrote that the ‘analysis of female talent grappling with a male tradition translates sexual difference into literary difference of genre, structure, voice, and plot’ (Abel 1982:2). As women’s studies gradually shifted to gender studies throughout the 1990s, so feminist literary theory widened its scope to a consideration of the functioning of gender in both literary creation and literary history.
Existing on a continuum with feminist literary theory, gender criticism has been particularly significant to masculinity and the study of men in a literary context (see Greenblatt and Gunn 1992:271–302). Sedgwick’s (1985) study of male homosocial bonding and its consequences for women as encountered in the triangles of desire in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction demonstrates how masculinity studies can enrich literary theory by using the insights of feminist theory to investigate men as gendered subjects. By the end of the twentieth century, gender as a category of analysis dominated literary theory, producing readings of texts in every genre and from every period that highlighted the way in which literature has at once contributed to and reflected the construction and performance of masculinities. Men are now common objects of inquiry as men in literary critical works, as is attested to by the large number of studies that link an author’s name with the word ‘masculinity’ (Conrad and Masculinity, Shakespeare and Masculinity are but two examples, both published in 2000). Gender criticism on literature published since the 1990s is highly diverse. Many of these literary studies of masculinity employ a ‘new historical’ approach, a corrective to the last two decades of the twentieth century’s dominance by ahistorical deconstructive approaches that obscured an account of specific masculinities’ cultural effects.
For the generation of male literary scholars who came to feminism not via the women’s movement but via late twentieth-century cultural theories, writing about men and masculinity in a feminist framework poses no contradiction of the kind their precursors often struggled with. As Claridge and Langland note, “‘Universality” is no gender for either sex’ (1990:8). In their important anthology, the eclecticism of literary critical interest in masculinity is reflected both in the contributors’ range of approaches and in the variety of time periods and authors they focus on. The first ‘full-length feminist study written by a man’ for the prestigious Women in Culture and Society series was published in 1987 (Boone 1987), and its author has also co-edited a collection of essays by male critics who think through the male position in culture in feminism’s wake (Boone and Cadden 1990). By 1990, it was no longer necessary for men to be defensive about their right to be feminist literary critics, but Claridge and Langland also noted in that year that male critics writing against the confines of patriarchal definitions of masculinity were not necessarily feminist (Claridge and Langland 1990). Each historical field of literary study now prominently features work on the representation of men and masculinity as the feminist work of re-vision has expanded from its initial concern with recovery to a current emphasis on the ways identities are structured by language and how gender is performed and understood at different times and in different places. The influence of queer theory, gay and lesbian studies, postcolonial studies (see Edmondson 1999) and new historicism on the broader field of literary theory has had transformative effects on how canonical texts are read and what constitutes notions of the literary, and also has marked out new areas for investigating the dialectical relations between aesthetics and gender formation.
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