ELAINE SHOWALTER

ELAINE SHOWALTER (BORN JANUARY 21,1941)

Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic,feminist and writer on cultural and social issues.she is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in united states academia.developing the cincept and practice of gynocritics.

Best known in academic and popular cultural fields,[1] she has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses.

career of Showalter: Showalter's best known works are Toward a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001). In 2007 Showalter was chair of the judges for the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker International Prize. Critical importance

Showalter's book Inventing Herself (2001), a survey of feminist icons, was the culmination of a lengthy interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition. Showalter’s early essays and editorial work in the late 1970s and the 1980s survey the history of the feminist tradition within the “wilderness” of literary theory and criticism. Working in the field of feminist literary theory and criticism, which was just emerging as a serious scholarly pursuit in universities in the 1970s, Showalter's writing reflects a conscious effort to convey the importance of mapping her discipline’s past in order to both ground it in substantive theory, and amass a knowledge base that will be able to inform a path for future feminist academic pursuit.

In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:

1)Feminine: In the Feminine phase (1840–1880), “women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture, and internalized its assumptions about female nature”. 2)Feminist: The Feminist phase (1880–1920) was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy.

3)Female: The Female phase (1920— ) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature".