多选题
When literary periods are defined on the basis of men's writing,
women's writing must be forcibly assimilated into an irrelevant grid: a
Renaissance that is not a renaissance for women, a Romantic period in which
women played very little part, a modernism with which women conflict.
Simultaneously, the history of women's writing has been suppressed, leaving
large, mysterious gaps in accounts of the development of various genres.
Feminist criticism is beginning to correct this situation. Margaret Anne Doody,
for example, suggests that during "the period between the death of Richardson
and the appearance of the novels of Scott and Austen", which has "been regarded
{{U}}as a dead period{{/U}}", late-eighteenth-century women writers actually
developed "the paradigm for women's fiction of the nineteenth century—something
hardly less than the paradigm of the nineteenth-century novel itself". Feminist
critics have also pointed out that the twentieth-century writer Virginia Woolf
belonged to a tradition other than modernism and that this tradition surfaces in
her work precisely where criticism has hitherto found obscurities, evasions,
implausibilities, and imperfections.
The passage provides
information that answers which of the following questions?
- A. In what tradition do feminist critics usually place Virginia Woolf?
- B. What are the main themes of women's fiction of the nineteenth
century?
- C. What events motivated the feminist reinterpretation of literary
history?
- D. How has the period between Richardson's death and Scott's and Austen's
novels traditionally been regarded by critics?
- E. How was the development of the nineteenth-century novel affected by
women's fiction in the same century?