It is now almost inconceivable that students of literature can pass through
universities without encountering the feminist revolution in literary theory and
criticism. Feminist literary theories are pluralist, borrowing from other types
of theory, such as marxism or postmodernism, but they always remain
woman-centered. Courses in women's writing, literature and gender, and
philosophy and literature proliferate--requiring readers to reconsider many of
the basic assumptions on which the study of literature was originally founded.