"An analysis of this novel that concentrates on its autobiographical aspects." --

With the publication of her first novel, "The Joy Luck Club", in 1989, Amy Tan was immediately recognized as a major contemporary novelist. Her work has received a great deal of attention and acclaim from feminist critics for its focus on issues of matrilineage and the ultimate triumph over female victimization. Enhanced by a chronology, bibliography, notes on the contributors, and a introductory essay by noted literature professor Harold Bloom.

To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier mythology...

"Contains the text of "The Yellow Wallpaper" in which a young woman loses her mind after her husband forces her to spend her days in a room with strange wallpaper; includes information that places the novel in its historical and cultural context."--

A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade.
I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.
On...