Susan Gubar

Susan Gubar
Name	Susan Gubar
Birth date	1944
Birth place	Indianapolis, Indiana
Occupation	Literary critic, author, professor
Alma mater	Rutgers University, Indiana University Bloomington
Notable works	"The Madwoman in the Attic", "Judas: A Narrative"
Awards	Frances B. Haysan Prize

Susan Gubar was an American literary critic, historian, and professor known for pioneering feminist readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature and for coauthoring foundational texts that reshaped studies of women writers and gender studies. Her scholarship engaged figures across the literary canon and the emergent fields of feminist theory, queer studies, and cultural history, influencing scholars at institutions such as University of Delaware, Rutgers University, and conferences like the Modern Language Association convention. Gubar's work combined archival research, close reading, and theoretical dialogue with contemporaries including Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Adrienne Rich, and Helen Vendler.

Early life and education

Gubar was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and completed undergraduate study at Indiana University Bloomington before pursuing graduate work at Rutgers University, where she earned her Ph.D. in English literature. During her formative years she studied canonical figures such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, and George Eliot, while engaging with twentieth-century thinkers like Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. Her doctoral research intersected with the rise of second-wave feminism and the scholarly debates advanced by critics including Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Academic career and teaching

Gubar taught at institutions including Indiana University, University of Vermont, and the University of Delaware where she influenced generations of students and scholars in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and American literature. She served on editorial boards and participated in professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the American Studies Association. Her teaching often integrated texts by Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, and Charles Dickens with critical frameworks drawn from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. Gubar also supervised dissertations that examined authors like Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood.

Major works and scholarship

Gubar's scholarship spans monographs, collaborative works, edited collections, and essays that map feminist interventions into literary history. Most influential was her coauthored book with Sandra Gilbert, "The Madwoman in the Attic", which reappraised nineteenth-century women writers including Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Jane Austen. She published studies on topics such as war literature, Jewish-American writing, and narrative form, engaging with authors like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Gubar edited and contributed to volumes addressing literary reception, the canon, and pedagogy, dialoguing with critics and theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and Lauren Berlant.

Feminist criticism and the "Madwoman" narrative

Gubar's articulation of the "madwoman" figure traced a lineage from Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason through representations in works by Aphra Behn, Anne Brontë, and Emily Brontë to modernist and contemporary texts. In collaboration with Sandra Gilbert, she argued that patriarchal structures produced literary tropes of madness, confinement, and transgression, reinterpreting scenes from novels by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy. Her interpretive moves conversed with feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter and Nancy Chodorow, and with psychoanalytic critics influenced by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The "madwoman" thesis generated debates with defenders of the traditional canon including Lionel Trilling-style humanist critics and interlocutors in New Criticism, prompting responses in venues ranging from PMLA to edited collections addressing feminist pedagogy.

Awards and honors

Gubar's work received recognition from academic and literary organizations. She earned awards and fellowships from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and university teaching prizes, and she participated in funded research projects with centers like the Schlesinger Library and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her books were widely cited and translated, garnering scholarly prizes and inclusion on lists maintained by organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies and the Modern Language Association.

Personal life and legacy

Gubar's personal archives, correspondence, and manuscripts have informed subsequent scholarship and are held in academic collections used by researchers studying women's history, literary criticism, and gender studies. Colleagues and students such as Sandra Gilbert, Elaine Showalter, Catherine Gallagher, and Martha Nussbaum have noted her influence on curricular reform, the expansion of canon debates, and interdisciplinary study. Her legacy persists in graduate seminars, edited anthologies, and continuing debates about representation by writers including Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Hilary Mantel. Gubar's interventions remain a touchstone for scholars reassessing nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts within feminist and cultural frameworks.

Category:Literary critics Category:Feminist scholars