Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work - her own 'coming of age' fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle - both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early novels, paying particular attention to Atwood's preoccupation with survival as a key symbol of Canadian literature, culture, and identity. She also considers the genre's afterlife on display in Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Moral Disorder, in which the formulations of selfhood and identity in Atwood's early fiction are revisited and developed. Atwood emerges as a writer who self-consciously invokes and then undercuts the traditions of the Bildungsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliams's book furthers our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fiction and contributes to ongoing conversations about the role gender and cultural contexts play in reframing generic boundaries.

This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the «politics of rememory» in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experience of African- and Asian-American women. This book analyzes the working through of repressed memories in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung in these texts highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.

This study analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison’s novels: The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Beloved. Heinert argues how Morrison’s novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the novel itself. This study goes beyond formalist analyses to show how these revisions expose the relationship between race, conventional generic forms, and the dominant culture. Morrison’s revisions critique the conventional roles of African Americans as subjects of and in the genre of the novel, and (re)write roles which instead privilege their subjectivity. This study provides readers with new ways of understanding Morrison’s novels. Whereas critics often fault Morrison for breaking with traditional forms and resisting resolution in her novels, this analysis show how Morrison’s revisions shift the narrative truth of the novel from its representation in conventional forms to its interpretation by the readers, who are responsible for constructing their own resolution or version of narrative truth. These revisions expose how the dominant culture has privileged specific forms of narration; in turn, these forms privilege the values of the dominant culture. Morrison’s novels attempt to undermine this privilege and rewrite the canon of American literature.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: African-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American female adolescents are representatives of minority groups in the United States. The three groups of ethnic girls were assigned derogative stereotypes by many Euro-American writers who did not portray their characters authentically. The modern female ethnic authors undertake the battle with stereotypes that are the main source of girls problems. They attempt to convince the reader that the lives of young girls cannot be interpreted according to offending images imposed on them. This thesis aims to draw attention to the problems encountered by female ethnic adolescents in Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye (1970), Maxine Hong Kingston s The Woman Warrior (1976), Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street (1984) and to portray their survival or collapse in American society. Each of the books presented in the present study is a masterpiece of great literary value. Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. Sandra Cisneros was the winner of the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. Maxine Kingston won the National Book Critics Award with The Woman Warrior, which was designated as non-fiction in 1976. All of these books contribute significantly to the study of ethnic female adolescents. The books chosen for the purpose of this thesis portray girls in an adolescent period. The adolescents presented in this study are aged between ten and twenty-one and are socially, economically and politically dependent on their parents or guardians. To further complicate matters, the experiences of girls of colour are more complex than those encountered by white adolescents. As the typical conflicts within the family, problems with gender, sexual development, education and friends are juxtaposed with issues of racism and very often a lower social status. In the light of these facts it does not come as a surprise that many ethnic adolescent girls have problems finding their self . The first section of the initial chapter of this thesis takes into consideration the stereotypical image of Euro-American adolescent girl as it often serves as a contradiction of the popular images of ethnic girls. Furthermore, the chapter examines stereotypes of African-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American adolescents. Despite their variety, the stereotypes are the cause of girls victimisation in society. The five following chapters analyse the problems more often [...]

Examination Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Throughout history, the highly contested concepts of race and gender have adversely shaped the lives of millions of people. In the United States it is most notably Native Africans and African Americans who have been victimized on the grounds of their skin color. Women of African descent have suffered a double jeopardy due to the intersection of race and gender. For a great many of African Americans, men and women alike, literature has become an “important vehicle to represent the social context, to expose inequality, racism and social injustice.” In The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison explores the issue of African American female identity. The female Bildungsroman scrutinizes the problem of growing up black and female in a society which equates beauty with blue-eyed whiteness. Consumer goods, the media, adult approval and a dismissive attitude towards her mislead the protagonist Pecola Breedlove to internalize white beauty standards. With the story of Pecola, Morrison points out how the internalization leads to racial self-loathing and eventually to self-destruction. Nonetheless, the negative tone of The Bluest Eye is in part counteracted through Claudia MacTeer, whose narrative is juxtaposed to Pecola’s anti-Bildung and thus turns the novel into a double Bildungsroman with one girl “growing up” and the other one “growing down.” The following thesis will focus on the issues of race and gender in The Bluest Eye. The topic can be considered of particular relevance as it addresses a theme which remained unexamined until the 1970s, a theme which many have not wanted to know about and which others have been in denial about. Morrison, though, faces the truth about the intersection of race and gender by exploring in her novel how racism and sexism function, as well as the devastating consequences that can occur. Her debut further underlines that the search for culprits is complicated since the perpetrators in the crimes against Pecola are often victims themselves. [...]

Part of the 'Contemporary World Writers' series, this book talks about Maxine Hong Kingston - one of America's most successful writers. It covers her works, including fiction and non-fiction.

This study examines feminist speculative fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and finds within it a new vision for the future. Rejecting notions of postmodern utopia as exclusionary, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor advances one defined in terms of hospitality, casting what she calls 'imaginative sympathy' as the foundation of utopian desire. Tracing these themes through the works of Atwood, Butler, Lessing and Winterson, as well as those of well-known Muslim feminists such as El Saadawi, Parsipur and Mernissi, Wagner-Lawlor balances literary analysis with innovative extensions of feminist philosophy to show how inclusionary utopian thinking can inform and promote political agency. Examining these contemporary fictions reveals the rewards of attending to a community that acknowledges difference, diversity and the imaginative potential of every human being.

Unsettling the Bildungsroman combines genre and cultural theory and offers a cross-ethnic comparative approach to the tradition of the female novel of development and the American coming-of-age narrative. Examines the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Audre Lorde.

This interdisciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.

One of the most important emerging novelists today, Khaled Hosseini has enjoyed critical success and popular accolades. His first book, The Kite Runner, was voted Reading Group Book of the Year in 2006 and 2007 and was made into a major motion picture. His second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, seems destined to follow the same path. Written for book club members and students, this guide overviews Hosseini's works, themes, characters, and contexts and relates his fiction to current events and popular culture. Sidebars present interesting information, and chapters contain questions to stimulate book club discussions and student research. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources. The book begins with a glance at Hosseini's life and his use of the novel form. It then looks at his novels, summarizing their plots and discussing his characters, themes, and contexts. The book gives close attention to his handling of current events in his works, and to the presence of his fiction in popular culture. Chapters include sidebars of interesting information, along with discussion questions designed to promote book club discussion and student research.