The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston

The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston PDF Author: Pin-chia Feng
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the «politics of rememory» in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experience of African- and Asian-American women. This book analyzes the working through of repressed memories in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung in these texts highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.

The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston

The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston PDF Author: Pin-chia Feng
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the «politics of rememory» in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experience of African- and Asian-American women. This book analyzes the working through of repressed memories in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung in these texts highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.

Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman

Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman PDF Author: Ellen McWilliams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351919938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work - her own 'coming of age' fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle - both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early novels, paying particular attention to Atwood's preoccupation with survival as a key symbol of Canadian literature, culture, and identity. She also considers the genre's afterlife on display in Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Moral Disorder, in which the formulations of selfhood and identity in Atwood's early fiction are revisited and developed. Atwood emerges as a writer who self-consciously invokes and then undercuts the traditions of the Bildungsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliams's book furthers our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fiction and contributes to ongoing conversations about the role gender and cultural contexts play in reframing generic boundaries.

Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison PDF Author: Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136085785
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
This study analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison’s novels: The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Beloved. Heinert argues how Morrison’s novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the novel itself. This study goes beyond formalist analyses to show how these revisions expose the relationship between race, conventional generic forms, and the dominant culture. Morrison’s revisions critique the conventional roles of African Americans as subjects of and in the genre of the novel, and (re)write roles which instead privilege their subjectivity. This study provides readers with new ways of understanding Morrison’s novels. Whereas critics often fault Morrison for breaking with traditional forms and resisting resolution in her novels, this analysis show how Morrison’s revisions shift the narrative truth of the novel from its representation in conventional forms to its interpretation by the readers, who are responsible for constructing their own resolution or version of narrative truth. These revisions expose how the dominant culture has privileged specific forms of narration; in turn, these forms privilege the values of the dominant culture. Morrison’s novels attempt to undermine this privilege and rewrite the canon of American literature.

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston PDF Author: Helena Grice
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847795633
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. In this volume Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist through both ethnic and feminist discourses, investigating her novels, occasional writings and her two-book 'life-writing project'. The publication of The Woman Warrior not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity -- or fakery -- of her cultural references. Grice traces the debates through the appearance of China Men (1981), as well as the novels, Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and her most recent work, The Fifth Book of Peace. Maxine Hong Kingston will be of value to students and academics researching in the areas of diaspora writing, contemporary American and Asian- Amercianfiction, as well as feminist and postcolonial literature.

Unsettling the Bildungsroman

Unsettling the Bildungsroman PDF Author: Stella Bolaki
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 940120067X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Unsettling the Bildungsroman combines genre and cultural theory and offers a cross-ethnic comparative approach to the tradition of the female novel of development and the American coming-of-age narrative. Examines the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Audre Lorde.

The Problems of ethnic female Adolescents as portrayed in Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye", Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior", Sandra Cisneros' "The House on Mango Street"

The Problems of ethnic female Adolescents as portrayed in Toni Morrison's Author: Anna Watorczyk
Publisher: diplom.de
ISBN: 3832490167
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: African-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American female adolescents are representatives of minority groups in the United States. The three groups of ethnic girls were assigned derogative stereotypes by many Euro-American writers who did not portray their characters authentically. The modern female ethnic authors undertake the battle with stereotypes that are the main source of girls problems. They attempt to convince the reader that the lives of young girls cannot be interpreted according to offending images imposed on them. This thesis aims to draw attention to the problems encountered by female ethnic adolescents in Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye (1970), Maxine Hong Kingston s The Woman Warrior (1976), Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street (1984) and to portray their survival or collapse in American society. Each of the books presented in the present study is a masterpiece of great literary value. Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. Sandra Cisneros was the winner of the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. Maxine Kingston won the National Book Critics Award with The Woman Warrior, which was designated as non-fiction in 1976. All of these books contribute significantly to the study of ethnic female adolescents. The books chosen for the purpose of this thesis portray girls in an adolescent period. The adolescents presented in this study are aged between ten and twenty-one and are socially, economically and politically dependent on their parents or guardians. To further complicate matters, the experiences of girls of colour are more complex than those encountered by white adolescents. As the typical conflicts within the family, problems with gender, sexual development, education and friends are juxtaposed with issues of racism and very often a lower social status. In the light of these facts it does not come as a surprise that many ethnic adolescent girls have problems finding their self . The first section of the initial chapter of this thesis takes into consideration the stereotypical image of Euro-American adolescent girl as it often serves as a contradiction of the popular images of ethnic girls. Furthermore, the chapter examines stereotypes of African-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American adolescents. Despite their variety, the stereotypes are the cause of girls victimisation in society. The five following chapters analyse the problems more often [...]

Rethinking the Bildungsroman

Rethinking the Bildungsroman PDF Author: Pin-Chia Feng
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description


Race and Gender in Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”

Race and Gender in Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” PDF Author: Kathrin Rosenbaum
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668094314
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Examination Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Throughout history, the highly contested concepts of race and gender have adversely shaped the lives of millions of people. In the United States it is most notably Native Africans and African Americans who have been victimized on the grounds of their skin color. Women of African descent have suffered a double jeopardy due to the intersection of race and gender. For a great many of African Americans, men and women alike, literature has become an “important vehicle to represent the social context, to expose inequality, racism and social injustice.” In The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison explores the issue of African American female identity. The female Bildungsroman scrutinizes the problem of growing up black and female in a society which equates beauty with blue-eyed whiteness. Consumer goods, the media, adult approval and a dismissive attitude towards her mislead the protagonist Pecola Breedlove to internalize white beauty standards. With the story of Pecola, Morrison points out how the internalization leads to racial self-loathing and eventually to self-destruction. Nonetheless, the negative tone of The Bluest Eye is in part counteracted through Claudia MacTeer, whose narrative is juxtaposed to Pecola’s anti-Bildung and thus turns the novel into a double Bildungsroman with one girl “growing up” and the other one “growing down.” The following thesis will focus on the issues of race and gender in The Bluest Eye. The topic can be considered of particular relevance as it addresses a theme which remained unexamined until the 1970s, a theme which many have not wanted to know about and which others have been in denial about. Morrison, though, faces the truth about the intersection of race and gender by exploring in her novel how racism and sexism function, as well as the devastating consequences that can occur. Her debut further underlines that the search for culprits is complicated since the perpetrators in the crimes against Pecola are often victims themselves. [...]

Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing

Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing PDF Author: Andrea Fernández-García
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030201074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book is an in-depth study of Latina girls, portrayed in five coming-of-age narratives by using spaces and places as hermeneutical tools. The texts under study here are Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender (2009), Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiography (1993), and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and Almost a Woman (1998). Unlike most representations of Latina girls, which are characterized by cultural inaccuracies, tropes of exoticism, and a tendency to associate the host society with modernity and their girls’ cultures of origin with backwardness and oppression, these texts contribute to reimagining the social differently from what the dominant imagery offers. By illustrating the vexing phenomena the characters have to negotiate on a daily basis (such as racism, sexism, and displacement), these narratives open avenues for a critical exploration of the legacies of colonial modernity. This book, therefore, not only enables an analysis of how the girls’ development is shaped by these structures of power, but also shows how such legacies are reversed as the characters negotiate their identities. It breaks with the longstanding characterization of young people, and especially Latina girls, as voiceless and deprived of agency, showing readers that this youth group also has say in controlling their lifeworlds.

Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels

Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels PDF Author: Jennifer Ho
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135469121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.