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Feminist criticism has come a long way in the last twenty years. Its development has been rapid, its snowball progress picking up elements of structuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism; just as rapidly it has been shedding its own early theories and methodologies. Now it is a critical orthodoxy with its own established canonical texts. Now is the time, then, to begin to question that orthodoxy. In Problems for Feminist Criticism five women critics seek to do that, in a spirit of enquiry whose central point of focus is the literature for which feminist critics have offered a re-

A biting, funny, up-to-the-minute collection of essays by a major political thinker that gets to the heart of what feminist criticism can do in the face of everyday politics.Stormy Daniels offered a #metoo moment, and Anderson Cooper missed it. Conservatives don't believe that gender is fluid, except when they're feminizing James Comey. "Gaslighting" is our word for male domination but a gaslight also lights the way for a woman's survival.Across two dozen trenchant, witty reflections, Bonnie Honig offers a biting feminist account of politics since Trump. In today's shock politics, Honig traces the continuing work of patriarchy, as powerful, mediocre men gaslight their way across the landscape of democratic institutions.But amid the plundering and patriarchy, feminist criticism finds ways to demand justice. Shell-Shocked shows how women have talked back, acted out, and built anew, exposing the practices and policies of feminization that have historically been aimed not just at women but also at racial and ethnic minorities. The task of feminist criticism—and this is what makes it particularly well-suited to this moment—is to respond to shock politics by resensitizing us to its injustices and honing the empathy needed for living with others in the world as equals. Feminist criticism's penchant for the particular and the idiosyncratic is part of its power. It is drawn to the loose threads of psychological and collective life, not to the well-worn fabrics with which communities and nations hide their shortcomings and deflect critical scrutiny of their injustices. Taking literary models such as Homer's Penelope and Toni Morrison's Cee, Honig draws out the loose threads from the fabric of shock politics' domination and begins unraveling them. Honig's damning, funny, and razor sharp essays take on popular culture, national politics, and political theory alike as texts for resensitizing through a feminist lens. Here are insightful readings of film and television, from Gaslight to Bombshell, Unbelievable to Stranger Things, Rambo to the Kavanaugh hearings. In seeking out the details that might break the spell of shock, this groundbreaking book illustrates alternative ways of living and writing in a time of public violence, plunder, and—hopefully—democratic renewal

Feminist criticism arose in response to developments in the field of the feminist movement. Many thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft raised their voice against the injustice done to women in every sphere of life. As this gained momentum throughout the world, feminist also awakened to the depiction and representation of women in literature which is one of the influential medium of socialization and culture. They argued that woman and womanhood are not biological facts but are given social constructs. One is not born a woman, but becomes one through culture and socialization. At first, feminist criticism was reactionary in the nature in the sense that they exposed stereotypical images of women in the literature. These images of women were promulgated by the male writers. These images of women were what men think of women. Gradually, feminist criticism moved from this phase to more constructive work. They unearthed many women writers that were either suppressed or neglected by the male literary tradition. In this way, they created a separate literary tradition of women writers. Feminist critics divided this tradition in such phases as feminine phase, feminist phase and female phase. They also studied the problems faced by female creative writers. They used theories from post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis to study the nature of female creativity. They also realized that there is an innate difference between male and female modes of writing. Feminist critics also exposed the sexiest nature of man-made language. They also exposed phallic centrism of much of the western literary theory and criticism. They also started to study the language used by the women writers. Simon De Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Elaine Showalter and Juliet Mitchell are some of the feminist critics discussed in this paper.