Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
For feminist criticism today it is, as perhaps it has always been, the best of times and the worst of times. When a critical school becomes the topic of a PMLA roundtable, it is safe to say that scholars currently consider it both solidly entrenched and dangerously diminished. Indeed, many would say that feminist criticism's success is the very sign of its failure, an indication that it has lost the renegade dynamism of its early days as an upstart outsider in the academy and declined into yet another stale paradigm on the verge of obsolescence, fit only to be recycled in anthologies or assessed in essays such as this one.