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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.
Catherine Rainwater, lecturer in English at the University of Texas at Austin, is co-editor of Three Contemporary Women Novelists: Hazzard, Ozick and Redmon.
William J. Scheick, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of a number of books, including The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction.
"The essays contain a useful balance of theory and detail for both the critical and general reader; the contributors are authorities in their fields who describe complex narrative strategies in an accessible style."—Choice
Publication Date
1985
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
9780813101682
eISBN
9780813157153
Keywords
American women writers, Women in literature, Women and literature, Narration
Disciplines
American Literature
Recommended Citation
Rainwater, Catherine and Scheick, Willliam J., "Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies" (1985). American Literature. 8.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_literature/8
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