Through feminist criticism, when readers started to look at the roles of women in literature, readers started expanding to other minorities and races. Readers started analyzing other roles in literature and what impact and analysis other groups had on literature instead of the common, white male literature. All literary criticism helps the reader look at the literary context in a different perspective. When women were introduced to the literary canon readers started looking at others in that perspective. Racial and ethnic criticism, gay and lesbian theory and others have all become different ways in which readers analyze because of women. Through the knowledge of looking through texts through the lens of feminist criticism readers can use those same techniques when looking at other group criticisms.
During the 1970’s African American criticism flourished and readers started becoming interested in African American works but African Americans have always have had their own culture in art and history and their way of writing is very unique. African American writers focused their writing on the “interaction with their culture and issues of nationalism and the exposure of the unjust treatment of African American- a suppressed, repressed, and colonized subculture- at the hands of their white conquers.” Through their struggles African Americans write about their oppression politically, socially and economically and their triumph time and time again. Like Women, African American writers are very new to the literary canon and their writings are new to the literary community. African Americans writing struggled to become recognized like feminist criticism because again the literary canon was made up entirely of white American males. Through the African American Criticism readers understand their culture more and their struggles more. The main theme in African American culture is their struggle. Through their struggle come unique themes and motifs in their writing. African American criticism emphasizes the struggle, just as feminist criticism focused on the daily struggles of women and how they view the world and their morals. These two criticisms are a lot alike because they let the reader learn about their culture and their way of life. African American criticism is new to the literary community and due to its impact on literature readers analyze it differently and learn of different cultures. This criticism is a lot like feminist criticism because readers read it the same way. For example when reading a literary text through the lens of feminist criticism readers are going to look at the role of women has in the story in comparison to men and the other characters and how women take care of certain issues, in the same way readers read African American criticism readers look at the criticism in the same way. Readers look at African American’s role in the story and how other characters and races in the story react to them. These two criticisms are a lot alike because they have struggled to be incorporated into the literary canon and had a major impact on it.
Feminist criticism was a leeway to gender criticism. Readers started to look at feminist criticism and seeing women’s roles in literature and wanted to look at the men’s role in literature. Readers look at “what it means to be a man and women and how men and women look at ethics, truth, personal identity, and society and how their opinions differ.” Gender studies came about after feminist criticism because readers look at women and how they viewed the world and what women thought were right and wrong, “The goal of gender studies is to analyze and challenge the established literary canon. Women themselves, gender specialists assert must challenge the hegemony and free themselves from the false assumptions and the long-held prejudices that have prevented them from defining themselves.” Men and women both are very prominent themes in literature and understanding the way literature views men and women can let the readers analyze the literary context more and understand the authors view of the world. This criticism came right after feminist criticism became popular. These two criticisms are very similar because both criticisms copy off of each other and a lot because the characteristics of feminist criticism are similar to gender criticism. Looking at the role of women and men in stories is the main idea of gender criticism, the only difference from gender criticism and feminist criticism is that gender criticism focuses more on what makes a man a man and a woman a woman and how society views them and how society thinks that men and women should behave and the morals and values they should have, when readers read through the lens of gender criticism readers must look at the men’s role equally as much as the women’s role because this criticism is all about the equality between the two genders. A reader must look at how the characters and how they relate and interact with each other through the texts and initially how the author views the characters and their role in the story. With this criticism readers are able to learn about women’s struggles as well as men’s struggles and a reader can learn of the stories underling meaning and understand the text more, and because of feminist criticism, gender criticism made its way to the literary community and readers can learn more about them.
Gay and lesbian criticism is a new form of criticism. It has been adopted in the literary canon just of twenty years, it started in 1990 with such works “as Bonnie Zimmerman's The Safe Sea of Women (1990), Robert K. Martin's The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979), and John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980) have looked at history, either in its "true" form or in the form of texts, and have elaborated how homosexuality has been a topic or theme within it.” Gay and lesbian criticism is related to gender theory due to the examination of men in women’s roles in the story but it brings an element of sexuality into that comparison and gay and lesbian rely on gender identification and those stereotypes in order to formulate its ideas. It takes the sexuality and looks at literature through the lens of both homosexual and heterosexual ways, “Both gay and lesbian studies began as liberation movements, in parallel with the feminist and African American movements” . Gay and lesbian criticism can be linked with African American criticism and the feminist criticism because just as African Americans and women had to cope with prejudices and hardships in order to have rights, lesbians and gays go through the same prejudices with in our society and in literature. With lesbian and gay criticism readers can look at text through the same perspective as feminist criticism because of the similar themes that are in both criticisms, such as sexuality, relationships between men and women and ultimately the prejudices gay and lesbian writes went and go through still. Through the themes and motifs that gay and lesbian criticisms bring to the readers, readers are able to understand more fully the author and his intentions for his or her context and through this knowledge; readers can also know more of feminist criticism and look at it in a different context.
Queer theory is also a new type of criticism to the literary community. “The term queer, designates the combination of gay and lesbian studies as well as the theoretical and critical writings that concern all modes of variance, such as cross-dressing, from the normative models of biological sex, gender identity, and sexual desires” It is very similar to gay and lesbian criticism in that it focuses on the sexuality of men and women but it also focuses on the identify of men and women who are gay and their role in society and how society views them. A popular author who was known for incorporating these themes was Ernest Hemingway. “Through Ernest Hemingway’s life he wore feminine clothing and/or a feminine hairstyle and his sister Grace Hemingway dressed and treated the two children as twins of the same sex--sometimes male and sometimes female and in his fiction, it portrays sexually passive men and romantic situations in which sexual identity shifts and is unclear. Furthermore, he offers a woman's point of view as few male authors can, giving uncommonly perceptive voices to female experiences” through this example his writing can have the themes in queer theory. Because queer theory and gay and lesbian criticism are so similar they share the same similarities with feminist criticism, like prejudices and the need to change the literary canon to include all authors of all races, sexualities, classes, and gender.
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