Writing About Ourselves (Images of Women in Fiction)

In 1972, the first anthology of feminist literary criticism was published by Bowling Green University Popular Press. The press presents contradictory images: the university press, publishing for a small, highly-educated audience, conflicts with "popular," its suggestion of a broad, demotic audience. Of the contributors to that anthology, the editor, Susan Koppelman Cornillon, writes: "Some of us haven't gone in formal education beyond high school and some of us have Ph. D.'s."1 The essays range from theoretically sophisticated articles with full scholarly apparatus reprinted from prestigious, mainstream academic journals (American Quarterly, New Literary History) to impressionistic pieces from feminist counterculture newspapers (Off Our Backs). The

~ontributors to later feminist critical anthologies will all be trained academics; the other anthologies more solidly and traditionally located within academic criticism and theory. This path-breaking 1972 book, Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, nonetheless, shares most of the characteristics of the genre it will have founded: feminist writing which takes the academic study of literature as its field of struggle.