ABSTRACT
Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose, edited by Cheryl L. Brown and Karen Olson, was photo-offset and published by The Scarecrow Press in 1978. I have chosen it over two much better known, and more expensively produced, anthologies to represent feminist criticism in the late seventies. The other texts considered for this chapter were: The Authority of Experience, edited by Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (1977), andShakespeare's Sisters, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979).1 This selection bespeaks no abstract superiority of the volume chosen-on the contrary-but does disclose some of the assumptions shaping the narrative I am constructing. This account of feminist literary theory in the seventies looks back from the point of view of that moment I call "around 1981." Trying to tell the story of how we got from Images of Women in Fiction in the early seventies to notions of feminist criticism widely accepted in the early eighties, I find this 1978 anthology most useful.
