One of the founders of feminist criticism and still one of its most important and influential practitioners, Elaine Showalter invented what she calls gynocritics, "concerned with woman as writer--with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women" ("Towards a Feminist Poetics," in Women Writing and Writing About Women, 1979). Gynocritics is differentiated on one hand from "feminist critique," which analyzes the results, in literature and criticism by men and in mainstream cultural history, of patriarchal marginalization and suppression of the female, and on the other hand from predominantly French theoretical explorations of the ramifications in language and culture of gender difference. In large part through Showalter's influence, gynocritics has become the predominant mode of feminist criticism practiced in the American academy.

Elaine Cottler was born on 21 January 1941 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Paul Cottler, born in Kiev, was...