ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the current state of feminist criticism and looks back at the canon wars with which it was intimately intertwined in the formative years from the 1970s through the 1990s. I argue that we are still in the aftermath of “recovery feminism,” salvaging lost women writers. This mission has been enormously valuable, but it has also shaped our theoretical questions according to specific notions of gender, chronology, and politics that we may no longer want to endorse. Reviewing the history of Victorian feminism and the canon, I ask how we might move on to rethink feminist Victorian studies in the digital era. What might a new feminist criticism entail?
