Still Resisting after All These Years

The impact of Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader on the development of feminist literary criticism, particularly of the American literary canon, is well known. The parallels between Fetterley's late 1970s call for women to become resistant readers and the work of literary historians invested in the actual reading practices of women reading women's writing (in novels of the early American period) are at the heart of this personal reflection.