SYNOPSIS Volume 1 Emma is the story of the wealthy, beautiful, spoiled only daughter of an aging widowed hypochondriac, Mr. Woodhouse. Nearly 21, she runs their large house, Hartfield, in Highbury, Surrey. The novel opens with the marriage of her… Read More ›
SYNOPSIS Volume 1 Old Mr. Dashwood of Norland Park in Sussex and his heir, his nephew Henry Dashwood, have died. Henry married twice. By his first marriage, he has a son, John. John and his four-year-old son, Henry, are in… Read More ›
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” [3]. So begins Jane Austen’s arguably most enduringly successful novel—one that has been translated into at least… Read More ›
Aurora Leigh is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most ambitious work. Both its very high poetic quality, when the poem is at its best, and its sometimes turgid moralizing, when it is at its worst, were noted by contemporary reviewers like George… Read More ›
Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, changes location from the geographical boundaries of the United States to the larger context of the Caribbean and Europe. In part, the novel is the story of two families, the Streets and the Childs,… Read More ›
Sula (1974) is Toni Morrison’s second published novel. Like The Bluest Eye, the novel is a story of two girls coming of age. As children, the two girls in question, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, function as two halves of… Read More ›
Like Morrison’s first two novels, The Bluest Eye and Sula, Song of Solomon (1977) is a coming of age story. Unlike her first two novels, Song of Solomon centrally is the saga of a young man. In fact, Song of… Read More ›
Jazz (1992) is the second of a trilogy of Morrison’s novels reflecting on the idea of love and its manifestations. The idea for the novel originated with a James Van Der Zee photograph of a dead teenaged woman who, knowing… Read More ›
The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first published novel. The novel takes place in the 1940s in the industrial northeast of Lorian, Ohio, and tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American woman who is marginalized by her… Read More ›
While the term “art theory” may well have been employed from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment as a means of validating certain philosophical practices of art, art historians in the second half of this century have become particularly uncomfortable with… Read More ›
Although feminists and socialists have engaged in continuous conversations since the nineteenth century, those crosscurrents within literary theory that might be designated “materialist feminisms” have their origins in the late 1960s with various attempts to synthesize feminist politics with Marxist… Read More ›
“The question of gender is a question of language.” This statement is Barbara Johnson’s (World 37), and her succinct formulation of the relationship between gender and language does much to characterize the approach of a group of feminists who draw… Read More ›
Women’s experience as encountered in female fictional characters, the reactions of women readers, and the careers, techniques, and topics of women writers was the focus of the most accessible feminist criticism in the United States and Britain by the mid-1970s…. Read More ›
In her highly influential critical A Room of Ones Own (1929), Virginial Woolf studied the cultural, economical and educational disabilities within the patriarchal system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. With her imaginary character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister),… Read More ›
Described on the cover as “a novel in seven stories,” The Women of Brewster Place chronicles the lives of seven black women as they struggle to survive in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood. Most of the women have arrived at the… Read More ›
The year 1993 was an exceptionally good one for Ernest Gaines. Turning sixty, he married for the first time, won the MacArthur award, and published A Lesson Before Dying. Gaines had invested seven years in the writing of this novel,… Read More ›
Like many novels, Catherine Carmier is about change and its effects. It is a young man’s novel asking questions of place and purpose that young people in particular wrestle with: Why aren’t things the way they were? What am I… Read More ›
In 1991, two years after her tremendous success with The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan published The Kitchen God’s Wife. Like many writers whose first books have received spectacular and widespread attention, Tan admits that she was more than a… Read More ›
With the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1988, Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) became a household name. The book was a tremendous critical and commercial success from the beginning. Before the end of its… Read More ›
With Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come… Read More ›