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Five Things You Need to Know About... Dr. Elaine Showalter
Dr. Showalter:
- is an American literary scholar and feminist who taught at Princeton until her retirement in 2003.
- pioneered the school of feminist literary criticism known as gynocriticism, which asserts the primacy of women’s experience to an understanding of women’s literature.
- spent the last four decades asserting and exploring the intellectual and imaginative legacies of women’s writing in books such as A Literature of Their Own (expanded ed. 1999) and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001).
- published A Jury of Her Peers in 2009, the first single-authored book-length history of American women writers from the seventeenth century to the present day.
- The quotable Showalter, from her chapter “Alien Abduction” in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997): “As the hystories get more bizarre, the experts get more impressive” (189).
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