From Feminine Sensibility to Gendered Evaluation in Modern Greek Poetry Criticism

Abstract

This article examines gendered evaluation across the broader span 1974–2024 through two clusters of reviews published during 1986–2002 and 2019–2024. It asks whether the decline of explicitly gendered classifications led to a more equal distribution of critical attributes or whether the older associations of “feminine sensibility” were instead recast in apparently neutral or formalist language. The study combines a brief genealogy, extending from nineteenth-century criticism through the interwar period, with a qualitative, comparative close reading of five pairs of reviews, each pair written by a single critic and concerning a woman poet and a man poet. Drawing on feminist theories of gender, literary value, and critical discourse, it examines the critical treatment of form, technique, intellectual authority, embodiment, experience, and universality. The findings indicate substantial but incomplete change. Women poets are increasingly credited with formal control, intellectual force, and poetic autonomy. Nevertheless, gendered asymmetries persist in the ways literary value is conferred. Women’s writing remains more readily marked as bodily, personal, natural, or exceptional, whereas men’s writing more easily enters the unmarked registers of philosophical reflection and universal significance. Gender thus survives less as an explicit classification than as an uneven structure of critical recognition.