Coppelia Kahn

Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism

Feminist scholarship employs gender as a fundamental organizing category of human experience, holding two related premises: men and women have different perceptions or experiences in the same contexts, the male perspective having been dominant in fields of knowledge; and that gender is not a natural fact but a social construct, a subject to study in any humanistic discipline. This challenging collection of essays by prominent feminist literary critics offers a comprehensive introduction to modes of critical practice being used to trace the construction of gender in literature. The collection provides an invaluable overview of current femionist critical thinking. Its essays address a wide range of topics: the rerlevance of gender scholarship in the social sciences to literary criticism; the tradition of womens literature and its relation to the canon; the politics of language; French theories of the feminine; psychoanalysis and feminism; feminist criticism of writing by lesbians and black women; the relationship between female subjectivity, class, and sexuality; feminist readings of the canon.

Changing subjects : the making of feminist literary criticism

Looking at History Decades Reading/Writing Against the Grain Legacies, Connections and Contradictions.

Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary

referred to as Homage. Delegates to this meeting, Gollancz notes, were sent by “institutions, universities, societies, and other bodies” and represented “the British Empire, the United States, and foreign countries” (vii). I wish to thank James Shapiro for telling me about Homage and encouraging me to work on it; Cyndia Clegg, chair of the Huntington Library Seminar in Renaissance Literature, for the chance to try out my ideas about the book; Suzanne Kiernan of the University of Sydney, for inviting me to present them in a longer version; and Michael Neill of the University of Auckland, who invited me to give a plenary lecture at the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference in July 2000. His stimulating suggestions during the revision process have greatly improved the final product. Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary

Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (review)

Gurr comments that “a new play about Richard III is not unlikely for this time [1602],” but he does not explore why that might be so (265n130). Shakespeare’s Opposites also poses navigational difficulties. Instead of providing a section of the bibliography for primary texts and editions, Gurr lists them in a lengthy footnote appended to a comment six pages into the first chapter. As well, in the appendix listing the Admiral’s company’s plays, Gurr eschews an alphabetical and therefore user-friendly order for the order in Henslowe’s diary; in this practice, he follows Greg, but his and Greg’s item numbers do not match. Most of the entries in the appendix carry a footnote, and footnotes throughout are set in an unpardonably small font size. Often these notes provide illuminating documentary evidence, as in the case of “Cox of Collumpton,” where Simon Forman’s summary of the play is provided along with the date and venue of the performance he saw (247n102). Yet that evidence is rendered tangential by its placement in a footnote. Gurr continues in Shakespeare’s Opposites a habit of his book titles since The Shakespearian Playing Companies: the subordination of all theatrical activity in the early modern period to Shakespeare and his company. The economy of identifying company business by some version of a familiar locution such as “Shakespeare’s time” is understandable, but cutting the Admiral’s Men from the main title of their own company history is a step too far. The term “opposites” is troublesome in itself for the negative implications, but Gurr uses it frequently to refer to Shakespeare’s company, inviting confusion about who is opposite to whom (for example, see pages 7, 32, 36, and 120). Generally, the Admiral’s Men suffer throughout the comparison that Gurr provides of “the duopoly companies” (5). Only in rare instances such as a choice of the disguise play do the Admiral’s Men seem to have made the smarter managerial, aesthetic, or commercial decision. Consequently, readers may be forgiven if they get the impression that the company Gurr would prefer to be discussing is Shakespeare’s, not its opposite.