SHOWALTER, ELAINE

born Jan. 21, 1941, Boston, Mass., U.S. American literary critic and teacher, and founder of gynocritics, a school of feminist criticism concerned with woman as writer . . . with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women. Showalter studied English at Bryn Mawr College (B.A., 1962), Brandeis University (M.A., 1964), and the University of California, Davis (Ph.D., 1970). She joined the faculty of Douglass College, the women's division of Rutgers University, in 1969, where she developed women's studies courses and began editing and contributing articles to books and periodicals about women's literature. She later taught at Rutgers and Princeton, neither of which hired women when she began her teaching career. Showalter developed her doctoral thesis into her first book, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront to Lessing (1977), a pioneering study in which she created a critical framework for analyzing literature by women. Her next book, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 18301980 (1985), was a historical examination of women and the practice of psychiatry. She also wrote Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sicle (1990), Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (1991), and Hystories: Historical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997) and edited several volumes, including The New Feminist Criticism (1985) and Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Sicle (1993).