Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Women Authors

Flannery O'Connor believed that fiction must try to achieve something on the order of what St. Gregory wrote about Scripture: every time it presents a fact, it must also disclose a mystery. O'Connor's artistic vision was located squarely in her Catholic faith, yet she realized that to view life only through the eyes of the Church was to ignore a large part of existence. In her fiction, therefore, she explored a wider world, employing voices that challenged conceptions of both self and faith, ultimately enlarging and deepening both. In The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, Robert...

The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers...

Written by Hispanic and non-Hispanic scholars, these twelve essays -- six in English and six in Spanish -- disclose how over the past four centuries static and formulaic images of women in Hispanic art and literature have given way to lively and original portrayals. The leading ladies explored in this volume include women who are objects of the male gaze, women who gaze upon the male body, women who are characters, and women who are writers, painters, and filmmakers. The essayists offer a panorama that stimulates the senses and challenges assumptions as they reveal strategies used by both...

Explored in this book are women's contributions to letter writing in western Europe from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. The essays represent the first attempt to chart medieval women's achievements in epistolarity, and the contributions to this volume situate the women writers in a historical context and employ a variety of feminist approaches.

"A sophisticated and well-informed work of literary criticism . . . . Represents the new scholarship on women and aging at its best."--Nancy K. Miller, Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

In a pioneering study of the three best-known French women writers of the 20th century, Bethany Ladimer examines the ways in which the aging process shaped their creativity and their lives.
Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, and Marguerite Duras all lived long lives and were prolific writers until the end. Bethany Ladimer's...

Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Anne Redmon, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker all seem to be especially concerned with narrative management. The ten essays in this book raise new and intriguing questions about the ways these leading women writers appropriate and transform generic norms and ultimately revise literary tradition to make it more inclusive of female experience, vision, and expression.

The contributors to this volume discover diverse narrative strategies. Beattie, Dillard, Paley, and Redmon in divergent...

American literature is no longer the refuge of the solitary hero. Like the society it mirrors, it is now a far richer, many-faceted explication of a complicated and diverse society -- racially, culturally, and ethnically interwoven and at the same time fractured and fractious.

Ten women writing fiction in America today -- Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle -- represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is distinctively American....

Frances Brooke (1724-1789), journalist, translator, playwright, novelist, and even co-manager of a theater, was described as "perhaps the first female novel-writer who attained a perfect purity and polish of style." Today, Brooke is known primarily for The History of Emily Montague, one of the earliest novels about Canada, where she lived for a number of years. But it is her third novel, The Excursion, that is an important example of the fashionable and popular English novels of the late 1770s.

Written for the very audience it portrays, this novel introduces the...

Actress, playwright, and novelist, Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793) won fame in England with the publication in 1757 of the first two volumes of Letters Between Henry and Frances, letters from her own courtship with Richard Griffith whom she secretly married in 1751. Her first novel, The Delicate Distress (1769), focuses on the problems women encounter after marriage -- the issue of financial independence for wives, the consequences of interfaith relationships, and the promiscuity of their husbands.

Against a backdrop of rural England and Paris of the ancien...