Quilting a New Canon: Stitching Women's Words, and: Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (review)

Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticismwas first published in 1991. This second and revised edition, published in 1997, features increased representation of women of color and lesbians’ voices, a reorganization of the sections and their contents, and numerous new essays. According to the editors, Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, this book was designed for use in courses on criticism and women in literature, although it certainly has appeal beyond that framework. A total of 65 essays authored by 66 different critics appear in this large collection that mainly focuses on British and North American literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of the fourteen sections is titled with a keyword that “represents the topic of lively discussions among feminists through the 1980s and into the mid-1990s” (xvi). The sections are, in the order they appear: institutions, canon, practice, conflicts, body, gaze, desire, reading, discourse, ethnicity, history, class, men, and autobiography. New to this edition are the sections on practice, conflicts, and gaze, while methodologies and tradition no longer appear.

Although the essays are arranged within particular sections, alternative arrangements appear at the end of this book. More than 50 additional keywords provide the basis for alternative arrangements of the essays, including such concepts as activism, sexuality, domesticity/home/family, imperialism/totalization, and voice. For readers and students new to feminist criticism and theory, this list of keywords is a useful indicator of, and introduction to, the types of conversations feminists have engaged in and the multiple paths open for exploration. As an instructor for an “Introduction to Women’s Studies” course—a course in which there is never enough time to provide adequate introductions—the long list of keywords and related essays at least offers a suggestion to students of what is out there and, one would hope, demonstrates the wide range of feminisms.

Each section is preceded by a brief introductory essay penned by editors Warhol and Herndl. These introductions function as a description of what is to follow rather than a critical evaluation of the essays themselves. Each consists of an overview of the keyword/concept at focus, definitions of terms specific to the concept, a basic summary of the selection, and an indication of why the selected essays were placed in the same section. These introductions serve as a useful starting point for newer and/or more interdisciplinary-type readers.

Quilting the Canon: Stitching Women’s Words, while featuring a section on revising the literary canon, is much more apparently interdisciplinary in comparison to Feminisms. Editor Uma Parameswaran arranged 28 essays into three sections: “Mary Wollstonecraft,” “Gender Counts,” and the aforementioned “Revising the Literary Canon.” Each of the essays represents at least one of the three types of processes Parameswaran deems necessary for revising a canon: retrieving, recording, and re-reading. The contributors chiefly work and reside in Canada, inside and outside of academia, and represent several disciplines, although Parameswaran notes that sociologists and literary critics outnumber the rest.

Quilting the Canonopens with three essays on Mary Wollstonecraft, and Parameswaran explains that the bicentennial of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) coincided with the start of work on this book. Parameswaran states that “the explication, analyses and application of Wollstonecraft’s ideas go beyond the three essays in the first section into the other sections, making Wollstonecraft a referent point for the volume even where the contributor makes no specific mention of her” (vi). The other two sections comprise the bulk of the book.

Many of the essays in the “Gender Counts” section reflect an interaction between university and community—“a moral obligation”—according to Parameswaran (vi). Among the essays representative of this...