Nation, Literature, and Gender - Outlines for a Romanian Case Study
Nation, Literature, and Gender - Outlines for a Romanian Case Study

Summary/Abstract: Feminist literary criticism has often been accused of losing connection with activism, with the less artistic everyday problems of the many, and thus not only of offering no solution to the discrimination faced by real women, but sometimes completely losing sight of it. While the high degree of theoretical knowledge necessary to understand the works of Kristeva, for example, and the fact that the immediate social effects of such reading or teaching are not particularly striking, may plead for this claim, I am going to argue in favour of feminist literary criticism as producing new insights that do not lose sight of social problems. One of the premises governing my approach is that not all feminist literary criticism can be described and accused in toto and that there are different trends governed by different assumptions about what one understands by an author, especially a woman author, and the nature of the relationship between her and the text signed by her; one of my attempts will be to highlight how a variety of feminist literary criticisms can be used. Another premise of my approach arises from the need to introduce into our equation containing gender and literature a third variable, namely the various ideologies of the nation state.

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