framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks‘ The Female Imagination, Showalter’s A Literature of their Own, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts. • Fourth-wave feminism aims to liberate all people from the diminishing forces of socially constructed masculinity and femininity. Fourth-wave feminism emerged in the early twenty-first century and continues many of the traditions and tactics of earlier waves. Fourth-wave feminism is best distinguished from its predecessors for its engagement with technology and is closely identified with online activism. It deals with concepts such as body positivity, women’s representation in the media, and sexist advertisements. • The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political, the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). • Literature was the main source that indicated what was an acceptable representation of femininity. During the 1970s, feminist criticism explored the mechanisms of patriarchy and the cultural mindset that resulted in sexual inequality. It delves into works of literature and tries to analyze them through a feminist lens, to uncover truths hidden in the work and questions such as misogyny or patriarchal dominance. It was a consequence of the women’s movement of the sand it helped critics realize the significance of the images of women promoted by literature.It started before the s with major literary works, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Olive Shreiner’s Women and Labour, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.Literary texts of this period can also be said to anticipate postmodernist views of gender in their emphasis on the
