In her examination of women characters created by American novelists from the 1940s through the 1980s, Thelma Shinn traces the emergence of new definitions of self and society as reflected in both the fictional characters she considers and in society as a whole. She argues that the social dislocation resulting from American involvement in World War II and the repercussions from that dislocation in American society initiated a cycle of growth in women that is accurately mirrored in the fiction of the period. Selecting more than 125 works of fiction, she examines the images of women and...

Focusing on the connection between metaphor and myth, Thelma Shinn provides a methaphoric reading of fantastic literature by women that enables the reader to glimpse its underlying mythic purpose and content. She examines some seventy novels by twenty-four women writers and draws on a rich variety of secondary sources in literature, women's studies, science fiction/fantasy scholarship, and comparative mythology.

This study presents an exciting new approach to novels that combine the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of contemporary life. Women are the prototypical Other in patriarchal societies, as can be seen in the first four novelists--Eudora Welty, Gloria Naylor, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing--who are primarily known as realists but who disrupt our expectations to shift our perspective. Moreover, Shinn analyzes how Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Cade Bambara write out of their consciousness as hyphenated Americans about what is...