A rereading of the American feminist criticism of the past two decades and the literary canon which it has constructed as its foundation. It reads a group of works that have become feminist classics - "Jane Eyre", "The Yellow Wallpaper", "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", "Their Eyes Are Watching God" and "The Colour Purple" - focusing on how each work represents talk and how feminist criticism has talked about these representations, developing the paradigm of "erotics of talk" - the search for the ideal listener....