29 Facts About Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter was born on January 21,1941 and is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues.

Elaine Showalter influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".

Elaine Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.

Elaine Showalter is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

Elaine Showalter is a specialist in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-siecle.

Elaine Showalter is the past-president of the Modern Language Association.

In 2007, Elaine Showalter was chair of the judges for the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker International Prize.

Elaine Showalter's book Inventing Herself, a survey of feminist icons, was the culmination of a lengthy interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition.

Elaine Showalter's caveat is that feminist critics must use cultural analyses as ways to understand what women write, rather than to dictate what they ought to write.

Elaine Showalter argues that women must work both inside and outside the male tradition simultaneously.

Elaine Showalter says that the most constructive approach to future feminist theory and criticism lies in a focus on nurturing a new feminine cultural perspective within a feminist tradition that at the same time exists within the male tradition, but on which it is not dependent and to which it is not answerable.

Elaine Showalter coined the term "gynocritics" to describe literary criticism based in on a female perspective.

Probably the best description Elaine Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:.

But, with grounding in theory and historical research, Elaine Showalter sees gynocriticism as a way to "learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture".

Elaine Showalter stresses heavily the need to free "ourselves from the lineal absolute of male literary history".

Moi particularly criticized Elaine Showalter's ideas regarding the Female phase, and its notions of a woman's singular autonomy and necessary search inward for a female identity.

Elaine Showalter came up against criticism in the late 1990s for some of her writing on popular culture that appeared in magazines like People and Vogue.

Elaine Showalter was reportedly severely criticized by her academic colleagues for her stance in favour of patriarchal symbols of consumer capitalism and traditional femininity.

Elaine Showalter was the television critic for People magazine in 1996.

In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media Elaine Showalter argues that hysteria, a medical condition traditionally seen as feminine, has persisted for centuries and is manifesting itself in cultural phenomena in the forms of socially and medically accepted maladies.

Psychological and physical effects of unhappy lives become "hysterical epidemics" when popular media saturate the public with paranoid reports and findings, essentially legitimizing, as Elaine Showalter calls them, "imaginary illnesses".

Elaine Showalter covers the contributions of predominately intellectuals like Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Camille Paglia.

Elaine Showalter covers approaches to teaching theory, preparing syllabi and talking about taboo subjects among many other practical topics.

Elaine Showalter says that teaching should be taken as seriously and given as much intellectual consideration as scholarship.

Elaine Showalter earned a bachelor's degree at Bryn Mawr College, a master's degree at Brandeis University, and a PhD in 1970 at the University of California, Davis.

Elaine Showalter joined Princeton University's faculty in 1984, and took early retirement in 2003.

Elaine Showalter's father was in the wool business and her mother was a housewife.

At the age of 21, Elaine Showalter was disowned by her parents for marrying outside the Jewish faith.

Elaine Showalter's husband, English Showalter, is a Yale-educated retired professor of 18th-century French literature who taught at Rutgers University-Camden.