Gale Literature Criticism brings together backfiles of several literary series from Gale: Children's Literature Review, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Drama Criticism, Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Shakespearean Criticism, Short Story Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism.
MLA International Bibliography indexes international scholarly materials, including over 4,400 journals, books, working papers, and conference proceedings on language, literature, linguistics, and folklore. It is updated 10 times a year.
Literary Reference Plus is a full-text database that combines information from major respected reference works, books, and literary journals. It includes thousands of full-text poems, short stories, synopses, critical essays, literary journals, reference books and author biographies, plus lesson plans and literary study guides.
HAPI Online covers political, economic, social, and cultural issues of Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean as well as Hispanics in the United States. It includes citations to articles, books reviews, and documents indexed in over 500 international journals. HAPI covers journals in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese, and German.
Features the works of Harold Bloom, often noted as one of the world's most renowned literary critics. The collection incorporates several specialized series, including Bloom’s Classic Critical Views, Bloom's Guides, Bloom’s Literary Themes, Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretation, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages and Bloom’s How to Write About Literature.
Poetry & Short Story Reference Source contains selected works of major and minor American and English poets, along with a wide range of international poetry. Works include plays and speeches, short stories and classic books, biographies, critical analyses, contextual essays and explications for important works, essays on poetic forms, literary terms, techniques and movements, multimedia (audio and video) of poets reading their works, and interviews from reputable sources.
Literary Reference Plus is a full-text database that combines information from major respected reference works, books, and literary journals. It includes thousands of full-text poems, short stories, synopses, critical essays, literary journals, reference books and author biographies, plus lesson plans and literary study guides.
Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek by
This addition to Rodopi Press s Dialogue Series presents a collection of essays solely dedicated to Woman Hollering Creek (1991), Sandra Cisneros s groundbreaking collection of short fiction stories and sketches. The emerging and veteran scholars who have contributed to this text approach Cisneros s work from varied perspectives, including negotiation of geographic and sociocultural borders, popular and material culture, and gender portrayals. Author dialogues, in which the scholars comment upon each other s research, constitute a unique, innovative feature of this particular volume. This book will be of interest to those engaged in Chicano/a literature and feminist/gender studies, as well as instructors of literary critical analysis."
Literary Contexts in Novels : Sandra Cisneros' 'The House on Mango Street' by 
Amy Tan by
Amy Tan has established a reputation as a major novelist of not only the Asian American experience but the universal experience of family relationships. With the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club in 1988, which touched the hearts of millions of readers, Tan joined the ranks of major contemporary novelists. Adapting her brand of Chinese traditional talk story as a vehicle for exploring the lives of the mothers and daughters at the center of her novels, Tan allows readers to experience the lives of her characters from multiple perspectives in parallel and intersecting narratives. In this first full-length study of her work, E.D. Huntley explores the fictional worlds Tan has created in her three novels, The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses. A biographical chapter discusses the relationship of Tan with her own mother and its influence and that of her family on the subject matter of her novels. A chapter on Tan's literary heritage places her squarely in the tradition of Asian American literature. Each novel is discussed in a separate chapter and includes sections on plot development, character development, narrative structure, literary devices, setting, and major themes. Each chapter also includes an alternative critical reading from which to approach the novel to help readers see the novel in a different light. A complete bibliography of Tan's writings, writings about her work, and a list of reviews of each novel completes the work. This study is the ideal guide for students and readers of Tan's novels.
Amy Tan, New Edition by
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. This addition to the Bloom's Modern Critical Views series is enhanced by a chronology, bibliography, notes on the contributors, and a introductory essay by noted literature professor Harold Bloom.
Sherman Alexie by
Sherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America. Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices.
Critical Insights: Sherman Alexie by
Noticed initially as a Native American author, Sherman Alexie has since achieved a reputation as a significant figure in the American literary landscape. The essays in this set discuss many different aspects of Alexie's works. Original essays include a comparison of Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Other essays discuss Reservation Blues, The Summer of the Black Widows, and two films, Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing.
Understanding Sherman Alexie by
In this first book-length examination of Native American poet, novelist, filmmaker, and short story writer Sherman Alexie, Daniel Grassian offers a comprehensive look at a writer immersed in traditional Native American, as well as mainstream American, culture. Grassian takes readers through Alexie�s career, from his first collections of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing and Old Shirts and New Skins, through such novels as Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, to the recent short story collection Ten Little Indians. Grassian suggests that Alexie�s oeuvre reflects his primary artistic challenge: how to write about Indians in a predominantly televisual country that distorts and complicates the importance and nature of ethnicity itself. Drawing comparisons with such established Native American writers as N. Scott Momaday and James Welch as well as with Generation X peers, Grassian presents Alexie�s work as equally informed by Native American culture and generic, mainstream influences. The picture of Alexie that emerges is one of a writer who is fiercely talented, intelligent, witty, and committed to helping readers understand contemporary Native American lives.
Literary and Cinematic Reservation in Selected Works of Native American Author Sherman Alexie by
This study explores the importance of the literary reservation of the mind in twentieth century native American literature. The book examines the contradictory nature of what the literary reservation space means primarily in the works of Sherman Alexie, but also includes discussions of works by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. Authors often recreate reservation space in positive ways, so their characters are able to survive colonial imposition and administration. The book deals with how Native authors reconcile fragmented identities with the landscape, and how damaging perceptions and policies regarding Native peoples have contributed to the reservation of the mind.
Zora Neale Hurston: an annotated bibliography of works and criticism by 
Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (LOA #75) by Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Insights by 
Understanding Gish Jen by
Jennifer Ann Ho introduces readers to a "typical American" writer, Gish Jen, the author of four novels, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town; a collection of short stories, Who's Irish?; and a collection of lectures, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen writes with an engaging, sardonic, and imaginative voice illuminating themes common to the American experience: immigration, assimilation, individualism, the freedom to choose one's path in life, and the complicated relationships that we have with our families and our communities. A second-generation Chinese American, Jen is widely recognized as an important American literary voice, at once accessible, philosophical, and thought-provoking. In addition to her novels, she has published widely in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Yale Review. Ho traces the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice. In the process she shows why Jen's observations about life in the United States, though revealed through the perspectives of her Asian American and Asian immigrant characters, resonate with a variety of audiences who find themselves reflected in Jen's accounts of love, grief, desire, disappointment, and the general domestic experiences that shape all our lives. Following a brief biographical sketch, Ho examines each of Jen's major works, showing how she traces the transformation of immigrant dreams into mundane life, explores the limits of self-identification, and characterizes problems of cross-national communication alongside the universal problems of aging and generational conflict. Looking beyond Jen's fiction work, a final chapter examines her essays and her concerns and stature as a public intellectual, and detailed primary and secondary bibliographies provide a valuable point of departure for both teaching and future scholarship.
Americas of Asian American Literature by
Drawing on a wide array of literary, historical, and theoretical sources, Rachel Lee addresses current debates on the relationship among Asian American ethnic identity, national belonging, globalization, and gender. Lee argues that scholars have traditionally placed undue emphasis on ethnic-based political commitments--whether these are construed as national or global--in their readings of Asian American texts. This has constrained the intelligibility of stories that are focused less on ethnicity than on kinship, family dynamics, eroticism, and gender roles. In response, Lee makes a case for a reconceptualized Asian American criticism that centrally features gender and sexuality. Through a critical analysis of select literary texts--novels by Carlos Bulosan, Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn, and Karen Yamashita--Lee probes the specific ways in which some Asian American authors have steered around ethnic themes with alternative tales circulating around gender and sexual identity. Lee makes it clear that what has been missing from current debates has been an analysis of the complex ways in which gender mediates questions of both national belonging and international migration. From anti-miscegenation legislation in the early twentieth century to poststructuralist theories of language to Third World feminist theory to critical studies of global cultural and economic flows, "The Americas of Asian American Literature" takes up pressing cultural and literary questions and points to a new direction in literary criticism.
Toni Morrison's Fiction by
In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other. As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination. Tracing Morrison's developing art and her career as a public intellectual, Furman examines the novels in order of publication. She also decodes their collective narrative chronology, which begins in the late seventeenth century and ends in the late twentieth century, as Morrison delineates three hundred years of African American experience. In Furman's view Morrison tells new and difficult stories of old, familiar histories such as the making of Colonial America and the racing of American society. In the final chapters Furman pays particular attention to form, noting Morrison's continuing practice of the kind of "deep" novelistic structure that transcends plot and imparts much of a novel's meaning. Furman demonstrates, through her helpful analyses, how engaging such innovations can be.
The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison by
Toni Morrison has written some of the most significant and demanding fiction of the modern age. Her dazzling depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, debated in the media and analyzed by scholars at an astounding rate. This Introduction offers readers a guide to the world of Morrison in all its complexity, from her status as a key player on the global intellectual stage to her unique perspective on American history and her innovative narrative techniques. Covering every novel from The Bluest Eye to A Mercy, Tessa Roynon combines close readings with critical insights into Morrison's other creative work, such as short stories, libretto and song lyrics and unpublished pieces for performance. Lively and accessibly written, Roynon's insightful text is ideal for readers approaching Morrison for the first time as well as those familiar with her work.
Offspring Fictions by
Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie¿s Family Novels is the first book-length study that examines families and especially the parent-child relationship in Rushdie¿s core works. It argues that Sigmund Freud¿s concept of the family and the author¿s variations thereon are central to a full understanding of the four novels Midnight¿s Children, Shame, the controversial The Satanic Verses and The Moor¿s Last Sigh, a quasi-sequel to Rushdie¿s first success. Through close readings that make use of a variety of critical approaches, Offspring Fictions provides a sustained examination of how the parents and children that people Rushdie¿s fictions reflect the larger issues his work is concerned with: nationalism, religion, history and authorship. Aimed primarily at academics and students, but also of interest to the general reader, Offspring Fictions provides a clear and insightful analysis of Rushdie¿s family tetralogy.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Rushdie¿s Tetralogy
Introduction
Chapter 1: Reading the Novels
Midnight¿s Children
Chapter 2: The Child Is Father of the Man: Creating Progeny in Midnight¿s Children
Chapter 3: Days Full of Potential Mothers and Possible Fathers: Saleem Sinai¿s Multiple Family Romances
Chapter 4: ¿The Mother-Goddess In Her Most Terrible Aspect¿: The Murder of Childhood and Dialogue
Shame
Chapter 5: Sins of the Parents: Monstrous Mothers and Absent Fathers
Chapter 6: ¿Discrete Parameters of a Family Squabble¿: Family Antagonisms
The Satanic Verses
Chapter 7: Absent Fathers and Fallen Sons: The Satanic Verses
Chapter 8: ¿Pleasechu Meechu, Hopeyu Guessma Nayym¿: Giving a Voice to Satanic Doubt
The Moor¿s Last Sigh
Chapter 9: Uprooting the Family Tree: The Moor¿s Last Sigh
Chapter 10: Conflicting Parents, Contesting Authors: Who Writes the Moor?
Chapter 11: From Ganesh to Dumbo: The First and the Last of the Family Novels
Select Bibliography
Index
Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie by 
Midnight's Children by
Edited by Joel Kuortti, a specialist in Salman Rushdie's works and post-colonial and transcultural writing, this volume presents a variety of new essays on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children marked a change in global literary scene as it inaugurated a heightened interest in writings from the formerly colonized countries. There had been post-colonial writings before but in its richness, full with magical realistic depiction and historiographical narration, Rushdie's novel became a trendsetter. Since its publication in 1981, Midnight's Children has been translated into several languages and, in 2012, adapted into a film. The essays in the volume discuss topics such as ethics, nationalism, translation, and the culture of globalization. Rounding out the volume is a bibliography of other important critical sources for readers seeking to study the novel and its themes further.
This Is How You Lose Her: short stories by
Finalist for the 2012 National Book Award A Time and People Top 10 Book of 2012 Finalist for the 2012 Story Prize Chosen as a notable or best book of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The LA Times, Newsday, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the iTunes bookstore, and many more... "Electrifying." -The New York Times Book Review "Exhibits the potent blend of literary eloquence and street cred that earned him a Pulitzer Prize... Díaz's prose is vulgar, brave, and poetic." -O Magazine From the award-winning author, a stunning collection that celebrates the haunting, impossible power of love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In a New Jersey laundry room, a woman does her lover's washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, these stories lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that "the half-life of love is forever."
Junot Díaz by
In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Díaz's imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing--especially his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world. Saldívar examines several aspects of Díaz's career, from his vexed relationship to the literary aesthetics of Whiteness that dominated his MFA experience and his critiques of the colonialities of power, race, and gender in culture and societies of the Dominican Republic, United States, and the Américas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldívar shows how Díaz's works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.
Reading Junot Diaz by
Dominican American author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz has gained international fame for his blended, cross-cultural fiction. Reading Junot Díaz is the first study to focus on his complete body of published works. It explores the totality of his work and provides a concise view of the interconnected and multilayered narrative that weaves throughout Díaz's writings. Christopher González analyzes both the formal and thematic features and discusses the work in the context of speculative and global fiction as well as Caribbean and Latino/a culture and language. Topics such as race, masculinity, migration, and Afro-Latinidad are examined in depth. González provides a synthesis of the prevailing critical studies of Díaz and offers many new insights into his work.
The Fiction of Junot Díaz by
The influence of Latin American writers--as well as other immigrant writers and their first-generation peers--has reframed the literary lens to include multiple views and codify the shift away from the tradition of white male writers who formed the core of the American literary canon for generations. Junot D az is one of the most prominent and influential writers in contemporary American literature. A first-generation Dominican American, the New Jersey native is at the forefront of a literary renaissance, portraying the significant demographic shifts taking place in the United States. In The Fiction of Junot D az: Reframing the Lens, Heather Ostman closely examines the linguistic, popular culture, and literary references woven throughout D az's fiction, including the short story collections Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, as well as the Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Ostman also considers D az's work as it relates to issues of identity, citizenship, culture, aesthetics, language, class, gender, and race. By exploring how D az reframes the immigrant narrative--highlighting his innovative linguistic and genre-based approach--Ostman provides crucial insights into how D az's writings relate to key issues in today's world. The Fiction of Junot D az will be of interest to scholars and students of the immigrant experience as well as fans of this gifted writer.