Kaplan rereads both American feminist criticism of the past two decades, and the literary canon which it has constructed as its foundation. Kaplan 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 Color Purple - focusing on how each work represents talk and how feminist critism has talked about these representations; developing the wonderful paradigm of "erotics of talk" - the search for the ideal listener.