First published in 1985, Sexual/Textual Politics is both an introduction to feminist literary criticism and an argument about what criticism is for.

Toril Moi maps the field through two broad traditions: Anglo-American feminist criticism, associated with writers such as Kate Millett, Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar; and French feminist theory, represented by Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Moi uses the decision to stage a conflict between criticism concerned with women’s representation and literary tradition, and theory concerned with language, subjectivity, sexual difference and the unstable construction of identity. 

Moi is a lucid but combative guide. She values the political force of early feminist criticism while questioning its tendency to treat “woman” as a coherent, self-evident category or to imagine a unified female literary tradition waiting to be recovered. Against criticism that simply counts stereotypes or substitutes women writers for men, she argues for an account of literature attentive to ideology, psychoanalysis and the ways language produces the identities it appears merely to describe. The book is therefore not a neutral survey; it is one of the interventions that helped move Anglophone feminist criticism toward poststructuralism.

Some of its oppositions now look cleaner than the intellectual history really was, and its readings of French theory belong unmistakably to the debates of the 1980s. That is part of its value. This is a compact record of feminist literary theory while the field was actively remaking its vocabulary—arguing over authorship, representation, essentialism, politics and whether a text can ever be separated from the structures that make it legible. For readers interested in how feminist criticism became theory rather than simply acquiring a new subject matter.

Routledge, 1990 reprint of the 1985 first edition. Paperback with light rubbing and handling wear; clean and firmly bound.