American women writing fiction Book

Ten women writing fiction in America today — Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Philips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle — represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is American. Their differing perspectives on literature and the American experience have produced Erdrich's stolid North Dakota plainswomen; Didion's sun-baked dreamers and screamers; the "urban ethnics" — Irish, Jewish, and African American — of Gordon, Schaeffer, and Bambara; Oates's small-town, often violent, neurotics; Lurie's intellectual sophisticates; and the southern survivors and victims, male and female of Phillips, Settle, and Godwin. The ten original essays in this collection focus on the traditional themes of identity, memory, family, and enclosure that pervade the fiction of these writers. The fictional women who emerge here, as the critics show, are often caught in the interwoven strands of memory, perceive literal and emotional space as entrapping, find identity elusive and frustrating, and experience the interweaving of silence, solitude, and family in complicated patterns. Each essay is followed by bibliographies of works by and about the writer in question.