embody, and whose interests they serve” (Canons and Contexts,102–5).
While, as we shall see, the “formalist virtues” may be found in the
work of several of these women poets, Lauter’s ideas encourage us to
be open to other “virtues” in their work as well. Similarly, Patrocinio
Schweickart, citing Annette Kolodny, writes that we all unconsciously
have learned to look at literature in a way that supports and perpetuates
the male canon. It is equally important, Schweickart feels, to develop
new ways of reading, new “interpretive strategies” that will help us ap-
preciate the achievements of women’s writing (“Reading Ourselves,”
29 ). Such new interpretive strategies will be discussed later in this chap-
ter. Tania Modleski suggests that critics “enhance the superiority of
the male hero and male text... at the expense of the feminine” because
of a Western tendency to “elevate what men do simply because men
do it” (Loving with a Vengeance, 12 ). Narrative pleasure, she believes, is
constituted differently for men and women, but, rather than investigat-
ing these differences, critics have disparaged women’s narratives ( 32 ).
Might Modleski’s ideas apply to nineteenth-century poetry as well?
Judith Fetterley attributes much of writers’ canonical status to thescholarly resources allocated to them. We know canonized American
writers are great before we read them—or even if we never read them—
she states, because of the “context” they have been given: “critical books
and articles, scholarly biographies, exhaustive bibliographies, special
and regular [conference] sessions, hundreds of discussions in hundreds
of classrooms... government-funded standard text editions,” critical
contexts that women writers until very recently rarely enjoyed (Provi-
sions, 34 ). Fetterley’s remarks are both controversial and intriguing in re-
lation to the Russian men and women poets under discussion and their
sharply contrasting reputations and critical “contexts.” Pushkin and his
pleiad (among them Anton Del’vig, Evgenii Baratynsky, and Nikolai
Iazykov) are considered to represent the Golden Age of Russian litera-
ture. Fedor Tiutchev and Afanasii Fet received a great deal of Soviet
scholarly attention (Fet despite his “unprogressive” political views), and
Mikhail Lermontov is the subject of his own encyclopedia. In contrast,
until the last few decades virtually no one had heard of the women writ-
ers of this generation.^32
Ultimately, the thinking of those who challenge literary canons leadsus beyond the idea of expanding those canons to questioning their
meaning altogether, along with definitions of the history of literature,
literary periods, literary standards, the hierarchy of genres, and the very
definition of literature itself.^33 Although I will not attempt to address
Introduction 13