Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity

by Zamora,Lois Parkinson

• ISBN13: 9780582226203
• ISBN10: 0582226201
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1998-09-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

General Editors'

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Moveable Boundaries - Public Definitions and Private Lives

Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La frontera: Cultural Studies, `Difference', and the Non-Unitary Subject

Subject, Voice, and Women in Some Contemporary Black American Women's Writing

Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in the Woman Warrior

History, Critical Theory, and Women's Social Practices: `Women's Time' and Housekeeping

Making Familia from Scratch: Split Subjectives in the Work of Helena

Native American Aesthetics: An Attitude of Relationship

Claiming and Making Ethnicity, Gender, and the Common Sense in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John

The Geography of Female Subjectivity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Diaspora

History, Memory and Language in Toni Morrison's Beloved

History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks

Literary Foremothers and Writers' Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical Fiction

A Perfect Marginality: Public and Private Telling in the Stories of Grace Paley

Selected Bibliography

Notes on Authors

Index

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