Women Shapeshifters: Transforming the Contemporary Novel

(Hardback)

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This study presents an exciting new approach to novels that combine the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of contemporary life. Women are the prototypical Other in partiarchal societies, as can be seen in the first four novelists - Eudora Welty, Gloria Naylor, Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing - who are primarily known as realists but who disrupt out expectations to shift our perspective. Moreover, Shinn analyses how Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Cade Bambara write out their consciousness as "hyphenated Americans" about what is necessary to achieve an integrated self and an integrated society. Shinn explores how these women have expanded not only the language but the very structure of their novels and have transformed the novelistic tradition.

Reviews

Urging a multicultural vision, [Shinn] concludes that storytellers can bring order, love, and healing to a fragmented society....Recommended for academic libraries...-Choice
"Urging a multicultural vision, Shinn concludes that storytellers can bring order, love, and healing to a fragmented society....Recommended for academic libraries..."-Choice
"Urging a multicultural vision, [Shinn] concludes that storytellers can bring order, love, and healing to a fragmented society....Recommended for academic libraries..."-Choice

Author Bio

THELMA J. SHINN is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Arizona State University. She has published in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Explorations in Ethnic Studies, Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, Literature and Psychology, and Modern Drama. She is the author of Radiant Daughters: Fictional American Women (Greenwood, 1986) and Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women (Greenwood, 1986).