Feminist Writings in the Perspective of Feminist Criticism: A Comparison of Fay Weldon's Weekend and Doris Lessing's To Room 19

Feminist literary criticism covers a broad range of theories and politics and it is hard to define the one feminist approach, however one of the main goals of feminist critics has been to point out patriarchal structures , oppression of women and inequalities of power between men and women. While these themes are often implicitly hidden in male literature, Weldon and Lessing dramatize and display them explicitly in their short stories. In this paper, some of the aspects of feminist theory will be applied to focus on the author's different ways of presenting patriarchal structures by analyzing the similarities, but most importantly the differences in their respective settings and characters. To create a basis for discussion, in the following chapter an analysis of the female and male main characters will be connected with a deeper look at the general themes and motives that both short stories display. Subsequently, the third chapter will deal with the significant differences of the characters and the plots, leading into the question in which way the authors influence their readers and what effect on the reader each author may have desired. Seminar paper aus dem Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Literatur, Note: 1,3, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Veranstaltung: Proseminar: Reading British Short Stories, 10 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Englisch.