Contemporary American Women Writers

Contemporary American Women Writers PDF Author: Catherine Rainwater
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813182999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
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.

Contemporary American Women Writers

Contemporary American Women Writers PDF Author: Catherine Rainwater
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813182999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book

Book Description
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.

You've Got to Read this

You've Got to Read this PDF Author: Ron Hansen
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
"An exciting new anthology of short fiction chosen by thirty-five of this country's most distinguished and popular fiction writers, You've Got to Read This offers readers an unusually intimate glimpse into how accomplished writers experience literature." "Here are stories that inspired today's leading novelists and short-story writers to embark on their own writing careers, stories that took their breath away and changed them, or the way they responded to literature, forever. Oscar Hijuelos confesses his debt to the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose brilliant story "The Aleph" inspired him to become a writer himself. Mary Gordon stands in awe of what James Joyce wrought in "The Dead," and wonders how writers who come after him can equal it. Robert Coover writes movingly of Angela Carter and her mysterious story "Reflections," while Kenneth A. McClane says that "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin literally saved his life." "Some of the stories presented here are classics, like Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries," introduced by Eudora Welty, or Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," selected by Sue Miller. Some are less well known, like Lars Gustafsson's "Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases," introduced by Charles Baxter, or John Updike's "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car," whose beauty stunned Lorrie Moore." "All were critically important to some of our finest contemporary writers - among them Annie Dillard, John Irving, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, Russell Banks, Jane Smiley, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff - and their comments about the selections offer fascinating entrances into the stories. For lovers of fiction, You've Got to Read This is a treasure trove, a dazzling collection of stories passionately and imaginatively chosen."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Contemporary American Women Writers

Contemporary American Women Writers PDF Author: Lois Parkinson Zamora
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317893069
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
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.

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life PDF Author: Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609386752
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers

Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers PDF Author: Laurie Champion
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031307643X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature PDF Author: Joelle Mann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000405664
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral investigates the formation and formulation of the contemporary novel through a historical analysis of voice studies and media studies. After situating research through voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, this book examines the expressions of a multi-media vocality, examining the interactions among cultural polemics, aesthetic forms, and changing media in the twenty-first century. The novel studies shown here trace the ways in which the viral aesthetics of the contemporary novel move language out of context, recontextualizing human testimony by galvanizing mixed media forms that shape contemporary literature in our age of networks. Through readings of American authors such as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Joseph O’Neill, Michael Cunningham, and Colum McCann, the book considers how voice acts as a site where identities combine, conform, and are questioned relationally. By listening to and tracing the spoken and unspoken voices of the novel, the author identifies a politics of listening and speaking in our mediated, informational society.

Contemporary American Fiction

Contemporary American Fiction PDF Author: Nick Hornby
Publisher: Vision Press (NM)
ISBN: 9780312042134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
"Contemporary American Fiction concentrates on a group of writers who have achieved prominence in the '80s, and in particular those writers anthologized in Granta's two highly influential collections, Dirty Realism and More Dirt. The book includes a major essay on Raymond Carver, arguably the most important literary figure of the decade; there is also a discussion of the work of Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, friends of Carver, whose writing shows similar sensibilities." "The last decade has seen a revival of interest in the short story; special attention is paid here to the emerging group of women writers--Bobbie Ann Mason, Joy Williams, Jayne Anne Phillips and Elizabeth Tallent, among others--whose stories continue the tradition of Eudora Welty, Willa Cather and Flannery O'Connor." "This study is a wide-ranging and readable introduction to the American 'New Wave' of writers, and contains interviews with some of the key figures. It will be of interest to anyone who has read and enjoyed the most vibrant writing to have come out of the U.S. for years."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Contemporary American Novel in Context

The Contemporary American Novel in Context PDF Author: Andrew Dix
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441132058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A critical introduction to the contemporary American novel focusing on contexts, key texts and criticism.

Some Other Frequency

Some Other Frequency PDF Author: Larry McCaffery
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812214420
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
McCaffery converses with the young, recklessly daring, and furiously productive William Vollmann and with Marianne Hauser, who published her first novel nearly sixty years ago ... with Native American trickster novelist Gerald Vizenor and "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe (whose literary technique is to "plant a bomb, sneak away") ... with stark minimalist Lydia Davis and text-and-collage artist Derek Pell ... with muscular pop icon Mark Leyner and proto-punk diva Kathy Acker. They are a diverse lot, shaped by very different literary and personal influences, and addressing divergent readerships.

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction PDF Author: Thomas D. Clareson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Discusses writers such as Poul Anderson, Brian W. Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Anthony Boucher, Ray Bradbury, Algis Budrys, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Samuel R. Delany, Lester del Rey, Philip K. Dick, Gordon R. Dickson, Thomas Disch, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Randall Garrett, Robert A. Heinlein, Zenna Henderson, Frank Herbert, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Murray Leinster, Anne McCaffrey, Judith Merril, A. Merritt, Walter M. Miller Jr., Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, Alexei Panshin, H. Beam Piper, Frederik Pohl, Joanna Russ, Robert Silverberg, Clifford D. Simak, Cordwainer Smith, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Norman Spinrad, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance, A.E. van Vogt, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Wollheim, RogerZelazny, Jack Williamson, and others.