Women writers and women readers have always had to work ‘against the grain’. Aristotle declared that ‘the female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities’, and St Thomas Aquinas believed that woman is an ‘imperfect man’. When John Donne wrote ‘Air and Angels’ he alluded to (but did not refute) Aquinas’s theory that form is masculine and matter feminine: the superior, godlike, male intellect impresses its form upon the malleable, inert, female matter. In pre-Mendelian days men regarded their sperm as the active seeds which give form to the waiting ovum, which lacks identity till it receives the male’s impress. In Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Oresteia, victory is granted by Athena to the male argument, put by Apollo, that the mother is no parent to her child. The victory of the male principle of intellect brings to an end the reign of the sensual female Furies and asserts patriarchy over matriarchy. Throughout its long history, feminism (for while the word may only have come into English usage in the 1890s, women’s conscious struggle to resist patriarchy goes much further back) has sought to disturb the complacent certainties of such a patriarchal culture, to assert a belief in sexual equality, and to eradicate sexist domination in transforming society. Mary Ellman, for example, in Thinking about Women (1968), apropos the sperm/ovum nexus above, reverses male-dominated ways of seeing by suggesting that we might prefer to regard the ovum as daring, independent and individualistic (rather than ‘apathetic’) and the sperm as conforming and sheeplike (rather than ‘enthusiastic’). Feminist criticism, in all its many and various manifestations, has also attempted to free itself from naturalized patriarchal notions of the literary and the literary-critical. As we implied in passing in the Introduction, this has meant a refusal to be incorporated by any particular ‘approach’ and to disturb and subvert all received theoretical praxes. In this respect, feminism and feminist criticism may be better termed a cultural politics than a ‘theory’ or ‘theories’.