Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1950–2020

Literary critics Gilbert and Gubar analyze the cultural legacy of feminism’s second wave in this comprehensive if uneven update to The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). They place major works by Sylvia Plath, Diane DiPrima, and Audre Lorde in the cultural context of the 1950s and ’60s, and dive deep into the feminist literature of the ’70s, including the antipatriarchal writings of Kate Millett, the poetry of Adrienne Rich, and the speculative fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Reactionary conservatism inspired the emergence of queer theory in the ’90s, though the knotty philosophical formulations of scholars including Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reflected a “growing divide between feminists inside the academy and those outside it.” Casting contemporary feminism as a resurgence of the second wave filtered through a broader set of concerns, Gilbert and Gubar discuss Rebecca Solnit’s response to mansplaining, Claudia Rankine’s emotional connections to the Black Lives Matter movement, and N.K. Jemisin’s environmentally centered feminist fantasies. The authors’ astute selections and skilled close readings are rewarding, but their devaluing of ideas that have emerged since the ’70s will frustrate younger feminists. Still, this is a well-informed and accessible survey of the literature of modern feminism. (Aug.)