Gynocriticism

The term ‘Gynocriticism’ is introduced by Elaine Showalter in her essay Towards a Feminist Poetics. It is a type of criticism that is concerned with woman as a writer or producer of textual meanings. It's concerned with the history, theme, genres and structures of literature by women. The subjects of gynocriticism includes psycho dynamics of  female creativity,  the problem of female language, the trajectory of female literary career, women's literary history and studies of particular women writers and their works

Gynocriticism has no theoretical affiliation to male theories like Marxism, structuralism and so on. It is more self contained and experimental with connections to other modes of new feminist research.  It has no affinity with  male literature; its program, instead, is to construct female framework for the analysis of women's literature.  It develops new models based on the study of experience instead of adopting male models and theories. It rejects the established male literary tradition because of it's sexist bias and seek to trace a female literary tradition. It intends to discover and reveal the hidden and neglected women writers.

Feminist Critique

The term 'Feminist Critique' was introduced by Elaine Showalter in her essay Towards a Feminist Poetics. It  is a type of  feminist criticism  that's concerned with woman as a reader or  consumer of male produced literature. It awakens the critic to the significance of text's sexual codes and provides  an entirely novel interpretation of it.

Feminist Critique is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of female audience especially in popular culture.  The subjects of feminist critic includes the images and stereotypes of women in Literature, the omission and misconceptions about women in criticism and the gaps in male constructed literary history.

The feminist critique is politically polemical because it has theoretical affiliations to Marxist aesthetics. The critic has a tendency to naturalize women's victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion.  As feminist critique is male oriented, it fails to  recall women's own feeling and experiences; it only states how men conceive and construct women identities in Literature.