Lawrence, Norman Mailer and others, while Ellen Moers's Literary Women ( 1976) and Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own ( 1977) revealed and pursued a female tradition of writing, along the lines of Woolf's suggestion that a woman writer can learn from her male predecessors, but cannot get help from them. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics ( 1971) took the second path with its acrid and funny exhibition of male mythologies in D. Woolf thereby set the agenda for much feminist criticism to follow, whether by exploring and recovering the work of neglected women writers or by examining the (often wildly biased or deeply buried) assumptions behind the portrayal of women in literature. Woolf addressed the question of women both as writers and as characters in works written by men, concluding that there was a huge discrepancy between the power of fictional or legendary women, like Cleopatra and Clytemnestra, and the powerlessness and virtual invisibility of most of their historical counterparts. There were, of course, feminists and feminist criticism long before the terms were used with any frequency, but a convenient modern landmark is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own ( 1929), perhaps best read in conjunction with her less conciliatory Three Guineas ( 1938).
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