Bringing Women Together, in Theory

Abstract

“Bringing Women Together, in Theory” explores which theories allow feminist modernist scholars to treat as worthy subjects of study more women writers than just those representative few about whom most monographs have been written, thus levelling the playing field between so-called major and minor writers. In the late twentieth-century the historically tense relationship between feminist criticism’s roots in liberal humanism, even as it has had to argue against its definitional constraints, put it in conceptual tension with post-structuralist theory from which feminist theory stemmed. These differences created a contentious and hierarchical relationship in the late-twentieth century between feminist scholars of modernism from which we may now just be emerging. This chapter analyzes the work of May Sinclair and also explores affect theory, low theory, transvaluation, and skepticism.