Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers

Presents alphabetized profiles of more than sixty twentieth- and twenty-first-century American women fiction writers, such as Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, describing their lives, major works and themes, and critical receptions and providing primary and secondary.

Les arrels del realisme màgic en els escrits de Borges i altres autors d'Amèrica Llatina han estat àmpliament reconeguts i ben documentades produint una sèrie d'estudis crítics, molts dels quals figuren en la bibliografia d'aquest treball. Dins d'aquest marc, aquest llibre presenta als lectors una varietat d'escriptores de grups ètnics, conegudes i menys conegudes, i les col·loca en un context literari en el que es tracten tant a nivell individual com a escriptores així com a nivell col·lectiu com a part d'un moviment artístic més ampli. Aquest llibre és el resultat del treball realitzat a les universitats de Sheffield i la de València i representa una valuosa investigació i una important contribució als estudis literaris.

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 ways rely heavily upon narrative gaps, surfaces, and silences, often suggesting depths which are lamentably absent from modern experience or which mysteriously elude language. For Kingston and Walker, verbal assertiveness is the focus of narratives depicting the gradual empowerment of female protagonists who learn to speak themselves into existence. Ozick and Tyler disrupt conventional reader expectations of the "anti-novel" and the "family novel," respectively. Finally, Morrison's and Piercy's works reveal how traditional narrative forms such as the Bildungsroman and the "soap opera" are adaptable to feminist purposes. In examining the writings of these ten important women authors, this book illuminates a significant moment in literary history when women's voices are profoundly reshaping American literary tradition.

This collection brings together critical essays that examine questions of identity and community in the fiction of contemporary American women writers among them Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisnernos. The essays consider how identities and societies are dramatized in particular works of fiction, and how these works reflect cultural communities outside the fictional frame - often the communities in which their authors live and work. The essays included here concern fictional representations of African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, Anglo and Euro-American communities and their working interactions in the multicultural United States. Each critic asks, in his or her own way, how a particular writer transforms her social grounding into language and literature. The introduction includes an overview of the range of literary criticism devoted to contemporary American women writers, and an extensive bibliography of complementary critical readings is provided to encourage further study. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary literature will find the text an invaluable guide to contemporary women's writing in America, and the range of criticism that this has given rise to.

This book brings together for the first time nine groundbreaking historical novels by women from the United States, Canada and Latin America, united by their focus on female adventurers. These novels introduce the neglected women of history, real and imagined, who accompanied their menfolk to the New World, and enabled its settlement or colonisation. Familiar novelists include Isabel Allende, Audrey Thomas and Jane Smiley, but this book also introduces less familiar writers who have produced richly textured and densely historical novels. In addition to putting women back into history, these writers engage with the literature of the past, including the American canon of male fiction which dominated literary history before the intervention of feminist scholars. The book begins with an introduction to the history of historical fiction and provides a theoretical, historical and geographical context for the novels themselves.

Las raíces del realismo mágico en los escritos de Borges y otros autores de América Latina han sido ampliamente reconocidos y bien documentadas produciendo una serie de estudios críticos, muchos de los cuales figuran en la bibliografía de este trabajo. Dentro de este marco, este libro presenta a los lectores una variedad de escritoras de grupos étnicos, conocidas y menos conocidas, y las coloca en un contexto literario en el que se tratan tanto a nivel individual como escritoras así como a nivel colectivo como parte de un movimiento artístico más amplio. Este libro es el resultado del trabajo realizado en las universidades de Sheffield y la de València y representa una valiosa investigación y una importante contribución a los estudios literarios.

Featuring original contributions by scholars in the field of women's studies, this invaluable reference illuminates the lives and works of Maya Angelou, Kate Chopin, Joan Didion, Anne Tyler, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and others.

Essays analyze ten popular films adapted from contemporary American fiction by women, addressing the ways in which the writers' feminist messages are reinterpreted and examining the extent to which filmmakers adapt, retain, or erase the feminist content of the original fiction. Films examined in include Ordinary People, The Women of Brewster Place, and Interview with the Vampire. Contains bandw photos. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This highly accessible, lively and informative study gives a clear and comprehensive overview of recent trends in American crime fiction. Building on a discussion of the immediate predecessors, Bertens and D'haen focus on the work of popular and award-winning authors of the last fifteen years. Particular attention is given to writers who have reworked established conventions and explored new directions, especially women and those from ethnic minorities.

This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to ‘canonical status’ and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.

This book examines representations of the specter in American twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. David Coughlan’s innovative structure has chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, particularly within the context of his 1993 text, Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter—that is, without ghost writing.

Updated throughout and with much new material, A History of American Literature, Second Edition, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey available of the myriad forms of American Literature from pre-Columbian times to the present. The most comprehensive and up-to-date history of American literature available today Covers fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction, as well as other forms of literature including folktale, spirituals, the detective story, the thriller, and science fiction Explores the plural character of American literature, including the contributions made by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American writers Considers how our understanding of American literature has changed over the past?thirty years Situates American literature in the contexts of American history, politics and society Offers an invaluable introduction to American literature for students at all levels, academic and general readers

From Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead and Terry McMillan, Darryl Dickson-Carr offers a definitive guide to contemporary African American literature. This volume-the only reference work devoted exclusively to African American fiction of the last thirty-five years-presents a wealth of factual and interpretive information about the major authors, texts, movements, and ideas that have shaped contemporary African American fiction. In more than 160 concise entries, arranged alphabetically, Dickson-Carr discusses the careers, works, and critical receptions of Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, Leon Forrest, as well as other prominent and lesser-known authors. Each entry presents ways of reading the author's works, identifies key themes and influences, assesses the writer's overarching significance, and includes sources for further research. Dickson-Carr addresses the influence of a variety of literary movements, critical theories, and publishers of African American work. Topics discussed include the Black Arts Movement, African American postmodernism, feminism, and the influence of hip-hop, the blues, and jazz on African American novelists. In tracing these developments, Dickson-Carr examines the multitude of ways authors have portrayed the diverse experiences of African Americans. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction situates African American fiction in the social, political, and cultural contexts of post-Civil Rights era America: the drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and the concomitant "war on drugs," the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for gay rights, feminism, the rise of HIV/AIDS, and racism's continuing effects on African American communities. Dickson-Carr also discusses the debates and controversies regarding the role of literature in African American life. The volume concludes with an extensive annotated bibliography of African American fiction and criticism.

This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.

This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked:* Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the 'fall' of America?* What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?* Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?* What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the conte

A much-needed introduction to the field of contemporary fiction studies. Introduces key areas of debate and offers in-depth discussions of the most significant texts. An ideal guide for those studying contemporary fiction for the first time.