by Elaine Showalter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2009
Certain to make its way onto college course lists, Showalter’s lucid, comprehensive survey should also find an appreciative...
At last—a New World companion volume to the distinguished feminist scholar’s pioneering A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977).
Showalter (Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, 2005, etc.) begins in the 17th century, spotlighting Anne Bradstreet’s poems and Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative as American literature’s founding documents. Poetry gets a great deal of attention, from 18th-century African-American Phillis Wheatley through Emily Dickinson to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, mad housewives who trashed domesticity and challenged male poetic hegemony in the 1950s and ’60s. Especially in her coverage of the 19th century, the author casts a wide net and considers the commercially successful novelists denigrated by Nathaniel Hawthorne as “a d—d mob of scribbling women.” She makes no exaggerated artistic claims for Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Maria Susanna Cummins and their ilk, but the author cogently elucidates how their popular fiction created an environment in which Harriet Beecher Stowe could write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first Great American Novel by a woman. Home, husbands and housework were staple subjects, and sources of conflict, but not until the 1890s did New Women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin scandalize critics with frank depictions of female sexuality. As the authors become better known, Showalter’s work necessarily becomes less groundbreaking. It remains intelligent and thorough, however, as she moves from Edith Wharton and Willa Cather at the beginning of the 20th century through the fraught relations between modernism and feminism in the ’20s, women writers both liberated and constrained by political radicalism in the ’30s and the repressive postwar cult of femininity that provoked the feminist explosion of the ’60s and ’70s (as well as such prominent naysayers as Joan Didion and Cynthia Ozick). Chapters on the ’80s and ’90s survey a more diverse, self-confident literature in which Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Jane Smiley, Annie Proulx and others write matter-of-factly as women without feeling limited in any way as to subject matter or style.
Certain to make its way onto college course lists, Showalter’s lucid, comprehensive survey should also find an appreciative audience of serious general readers.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4123-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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edited by Elaine Showalter
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by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson
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by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis
by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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