A THEORY OF FEMINIST CRITICISMS

In the first section of this work, I present a theoretical framework that describes the philosophical bases of literary criticisms--their subject, subject-matters (aspects of the subject), dialectics (methods of reasoning), and epistemology (construal of knowers, knowing, objects, and knowledge in the domain of inquiry). Applying it to traditional literary criticisms and then to feminist literary criticisms, I show that the differences between them are located in the constitutive elements of the literary research tradition, leading me to reject it as fundamentally incompatible with feminist literary criticisms. What I propose instead is that feminist literary criticisms are bound into a research tradition of their own by their common subject, subject-matters, dialectics, and epistemology.;The last section returns to theory to propose a coherent basis for feminist inquiry. Reviewing sample works in feminist psychology, anthropology, political philosophy, language, history of science, and biology, I indicate that these have in common with feminist literary criticisms a subject, subject-matters, dialectics, and epistemology. In conclusion, I discuss the feminist inquiries into race, class, and affectional preference that are analogues for that into sex-gender. Together, I surmise, they offer the possibility of a new epistemic synthesis.;The second section demonstrates part of the theory--the formal, comparative, and historical approach to ideas about sex-gender--in a history of ideas study. I show that for their treatment of both sexes eighteenth century British philosophies of human nature may be classified as gender ideologies--determinism, liberalisms, and feminism. I trace these ideologies in moral and political philosophy, conduct books, education treatises, panegyrics, satires, travels, and polemics. What makes the account an intellectual history, not a taxonomic exercise, is that numerous writers promoted these ideologies and responded to each other. They knew the ideological traditions and their great stake in the forms of social existence.