Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Women Authors

The women's bestseller has become the acknowledged literary phenomenon of the last half-century. Madonne M. Miner takes the first critical look at this development and offers a serious reading of five of the most famous twentieth-century women's bestsellers--"Gone with the Wind," "Forever Amber," "Peyton Place," "Valley of the Dolls," and "Scruples." She outlines repeated plot structures, image patterns, and thematic concerns. From these Miner constructs a twentieth-century white middle-class American woman's story, suggests ways in which female readers respond to women's bestsellers, and...

Roger Whitlow demonstrates that the negative criticism about the women characters in Ernest Hemingway's fiction is often misguided, perhaps entirely wrong. He argues that most of Hemingway's female characters have strengths that have been consistently overlooked by critics prejudiced by earlier Hemingway criticism or influenced in their evaluations by the male characters with whom Hemingway's women often associate. For example, Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls have been uniformly typed passive sex kittens, when, in fact, each is engaged in a...

Making use of recent feminist critical theory, Doane considers Gertrude Stein's modernist preoccupation with narrative silence in her early novels. She demonstrates the effects of this preoccupation on Stein's literary development, from the conventionality of her first novel, "Q.E.D.," through "Fernhurst" and "Three Lives," to the radical transgressions against narrative intelligibility in "The Making Of Americans." Doane, contending that Stein's ultimate revolt against traditional modes of discourse is directly attributable to her position as a woman writer, effectively elaborates the...

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...

This selection of essays reveals the response of nineteenth-century women writers to the industrial revolution in Europe. Although it illustrates the variety of social and cultural backgrounds of authors whose lives spanned two centuries, this volume is unified by the introductory essay which explains how the industrial revolution altered women's perceptions of their roles, rights, and places in society. Subsequent essays treat the dual rebellions of women against personal and political mores, and describe how they attempted to escape sexual and cultural constraints and effected social...

This work demonstrates the ways in which a complex of ideas with a misogynistic basis relates to the image of the venomous woman--the woman who uses poisons or potions, who has a relationship with a venomous animal, or who is herself poisonous. Hallissy suggests that the venomous woman is an image of feminine power reflected in masculine fear. The study concentrates on periods when ignorance of the medicinal effects of poisons exaggerated the potency of this image. It examines works of literature which span a large period of time but are linked by this persistent image. Through its...

Combining assiduous attention to biography and bibliography with original literary criticism oriented toward feminist theory, this volume profiles and analyzes fifty significant women writers of Spain--some celebrated and some overlooked--from the fourteenth century to the present. The work includes poets, fiction writers, dramatists, and essayists. Lives and works are examined with reference to complex issues surrounding gender, creativity, and social mores. Partly informed by findings of the fifty contributing scholars, Levine and Marson have also provided a volume introduction...

Women Writers in Russian Literature presents a critical overview of Russian women writers from earliest times to the present, including emigre authors. Each of the 14 essays is by a scholar in a particular field; together, they cover all of Russian literature--from old Russia through the 18th and 19th centuries and up to the present--and include all genres: prose, poetry, drama, and autobiography. This collection examines images of women, and reintroduces Russian women writers whose recognition is long overdue. It also focuses on issues of reception and canon formation, and the...

A major contemporary writer, Anne Tyler has published 13 novels and almost 50 short stories. Her earliest fiction was published in the Duke University literary magazine during her undergraduate years. In 1964, she published her first novel, "If Morning Ever Comes." She attained fame with "The Accidental Tourist" (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into a movie. Her next novel, "Breathing Lessons" (1988), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and she has acquired a loyal following of readers. She has also written numerous reviews, and her short fiction has...

During the last decade, women's narrative has become a recognized force in Mexican letters. The essays in this collection explore the recent work of nine contemporary Mexican women writers. Many of the works have been translated into English; some, like Laura Esquivel's "Like Water for Chocolate," have become international best sellers. The unprecedented commercial success of these novels has generated mixed reactions: at the same time that the secondary status afforded women's narrative has come to be questioned in many academic circles, some authors are dissociating themselves from...

With the publication of her novel Annie John in 1985, Jamaica Kincaid entered the ranks of the best novelists of her generation. Her three autobiographical novels, Annie John, Lucy, and Autobiography of My Mother, and collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, touch on the universal theme of coming-of-age and the female adolescent's need to sever her ties to her mother. This angst is couched in the social landscape of post-colonial Antigua, a small Caribbean island whose legacy of racism affects Kincaid's protagonists. Her fiction rewrites...

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is one of 20th-century America's foremost fiction and folklore writers. Though she was criticized by some of her contemporaries, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, her works are now frequently taught in literature courses and are widely admired for their style and substance. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to the large body of work written about her in the last 75 years. Included are annotated entries for books, dissertations, and theses written about Hurston's life and literary career. The volume also looks at hundreds of articles, book...

Kate Chopin has emerged as one of the most significant American writers of the nineteenth century. Though her works typically reflect the language and customs of the Louisiana of her memories, they also make universal comments about women, men, and human relationships. Best known as the author of "The Awakening" (1899), she also wrote nearly a hundred short stories, essays, poems, reviews, and a play. While the contemporary response to her works was sometimes negative, much recent critical debate concerns her lasting place in the American literary canon, with some scholars placing "The...

From her early classic "Three Lives" to her best-selling "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" to "Brewsie and Willie, " a loving tribute to the G.I.s who adored her, Gertrude Stein's work was among the most controversial of the modernist movement. Alternately praised and derided, emulated and ridiculed, Stein was as unique a celebrity as the mass media of the early 20th century ever produced. As her influence spread through the lost generation she nurtured, critics from Edmund Wilson to confidant Carl Van Vechten defended her experimentation against the slings and arrows of the literary...

The neo-slave narrative is an important development in American literary history and has serious revisionist intentions at its foundation. This book examines how contemporary African American women writers have shaped the genre. These authors have written neo-slave narratives to reinscribe history from the perspective of the African American woman, most specifically the nineteenth century enslaved mother. The writers considered in this study--Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, Gayl Jones, and Octavia Butler--explore American slavery through the lens of gender, both...

Dr. Alexis Brooks De Vita takes up the challenge to develop culturally relevant modes of literary analysis of African/Diaspora literatures by identifying traditional African and Diaspora figures of myth, religion, legend, and history that interact with African and Diaspora literary heroines and their authors. Following upon Karla Holloway's arguments in "Moorings and Metaphors" that African American and West African women share strong traits of storytelling that both isolate and identify their literatures, Brooks De Vita traces these traits to their religious, legendary, and historical...

Women have been writing in the Catholic tradition since early medieval times, yet no single volume has brought together critical evaluations of their works until now. The first reference of its kind, "Catholic Women Writers" provides entries on 64 Catholic women writers from around the world and across the centuries. Each of the entries is written by an expert contributor and includes a biography of the author; a critical discussion of her works, especially her Catholic and women's themes; an overview of her critical reception; and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources....

On first consideration, Nobel prize winning African-American author Toni Morrison would seem to have little in common with Virginia Woolf, the British writer who challenged Victorian concepts of womanhood. But Woolf's achievement and influence have been enduring, so much so that Morrison wrote her masters thesis on Woolf and William Faulkner. In that thesis, Morrison gives special attention to issues of isolation, and she notes that for Woolf, isolation brought a sense of freedom that the attached could never comprehend. This book examines the literary relationship between Woolf and...

From ancient Greece through the present day, women writers have confronted the male urge to make war by imagining communities in which intuitive bonding among individuals questions and replaces masculinist values of aggression and competition. "Women's Vision in Western Literature" traces the gender gap in literature from 600 B.C. to the present day through an examination of seven extraordinary women writers from Sappho to Christa Wolf. Combining close readings with a comprehensive overview of the careers of these women, Porter shows how the threat, the experience, and the aftermath of war...

Willa Cather's elegiac tales of the pioneer experience on the American frontier continue to captivate new generations of readers. Written especially for students, this critical introduction offers insightful yet accessible criticism of Cather's most widely read novels. A full chapter examines each work, with full discussions of character development, thematic concerns, plot, critical reception, and historical contexts. Students will find this book a valuable guide to this great American author.

The volume covers such enduring works as "Alexander's Bridge, " "O Pioneers , " "The Song of...