What objections have modern Japanese male intellectuals marshaled against women writers trying to enter and survive in the male-dominated literary world? How have Japanese women writers, critics, and scholars fought back? Woman Critiqued delivers an array of vivid insights into these questions through translations of critical works about the role of “the writing woman” from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Collectively a discourse on gender and writing, this anthology traces the debate over women writers and exposes the mechanisms by which the modern Japanese canon has marginalized them. As editor Rebecca L. Copeland writes, to understand the lengths to which the modern woman writer in Japan has gone in order to be heard, “We must listen to the admonitions that have been whispered in her ear and pay attention to the way she has herself responded to them” (p. 2). Disclosing “the evaluative...

You do not currently have access to this content.