There are two distinct modes of feminist criticism. The first mode is concerned with women as reader and this is termed Feminist critique. The second mode is concerned with women as writer and hence called Gynocrtics.
The term is introduced by Elaine Showalter in her essay "Toward a Feminist Poetics" published in 1979 and later elaborated in "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness", 1981. Gynocritics focuses on images, themes, plots, and genres, on individual authors and patterns of influence among women, in an effort to identify what is specifically characteristic of women's writing and to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's literature". Associated primarily with Anglo American feminist criticism of the late 1970s, gynocrtics seeks to recover the unknown, and to re-read the known, writing by women in order to 'map the territory' of a female literary tradition.
Showalter called Gynocritics the "second phase" of feminist criticism, because it succeeded and built upon an earlier phase of "feminist critique", which has focused on women as the writers of male texts.
