Question: Should good literature - good, true writing - transcend gender, like some say androgynous Shakespeare did? Or should it remain true to one's own experience? (ie. Jane Austen is writing clearly as a woman; Cormac McCarthy as a man.)
We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
Comments
You should also recognize the truth you posited in the question: regardless of whether good literature transcends gender or not, it is still good literature.