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American Post-Modernist Novels
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The Introduction to Literary Context series provides introductory overviews of some of the world's best-known works of literature, including novels, short stories, novellas, and poems, placing them in historical, societal, scientific and religious context of their time to deepen understanding and encourage discussion. This volume introduces literary contexts as they apply to American novels written post 1960, by American and Canadian authors, offering high school and undergraduate students a working foundation of literary context designed to prepare them for more critical literary analysis, such as in Critical Insights. br> This new series - Introduction to Literary Context -- provides richly detailed essays on significant American post-modernist novels that are studied by upper high school and undergraduate college students. It includes post-modern works by both American and Canadian authors. This volume includes discussion of 36 novels, including: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (Julia Alverez); Libra (Don DeLillo); Girl, Interrupted (Susana Kaysan); The Red Tent (Anita Diamant); The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood); Neruomancer (William Gibson); The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer); Beloved (Toni Morrison); Zombie (Joyce Carol Oates); Rabbit Run (John Updike); and Jailbird (Kurt Vonnegut). Each essay examines these novels through the following categories: Content Synopsis; Societal Context; Scientific & Technological Context; and Biographical Context. Designed to introduce high school and undergraduate students to these literary concepts, this volume is a valuable forerunner to the more rigorous critical analysis provided in Salem's Critical Insights series. Indeed, many of the novels, authors, and themes covered in Introduction to Literary Context have a companion Critical Insight volume for continued study. The essays in Introduction to Literary Context: American Post-Modernist Novels also include a list of Complementary Texts, Discussion Questions, and Essay Questions to help students get the most out of their study of these novels.
Conversations with Mexican American Writers: Languages and Literatures in the Borderlands
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Through a series of interviews with nine acclaimed authors, Conversations with Mexican American Writers explores the languages and literature of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a confluence of social, cultural, historical, and political forces. In their conversations, these authors discuss their linguistic choices within the context of language policies and language attitudes in the United States, as well as the East Coast publishing industry's mandates. The interviews reveal the cultural and geographical marginalization endured by Mexican American writers, whose voices are muted because they produce literature from the remotest parts of the country and about people on the social fringes. Out of these interviews emerges a portrait of the borderlands as a dynamic space of international exchange, one that is situated and can only be understood fully within a global context.
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros
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The House on Mango Street is easily one of the most critically and commercially successful novels by a Mexican American writer. Since its publication in 1984, more than one million copies have been sold, and it regularly appears on high school and college reading lists. In deceptively simple prose, it tells the stories of a young Mexican American girl's family and friends and of her coming-of-age within an impoverished Chicago neighborhood. Both universal in theme and culturally specific, it stands as a landmark in Chicano/a and American literature. Edited and with an introduction by María Herrera-Sobek, Professor of Chicano Studies and the Luis Leal Endowed Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this volume in the Critical Insights series offers a comprehensive introduction to Sandra Cisneros's acclaimed novel. Herrera-Sobek reasons that a large part of the novel's success can be attributed to its simple prose and reliance on suggestive metaphors and similes, and Chloë Schama, writing on behalf of The Paris Review, reflects on the urgency Cisneros felt as she wrote her novel. For readers studying Mango Street for the first time, a quartet of essays offer a framework for developing a deeper understanding of its key themes and contexts. Amelia María de la Luz Montes points out how Cisneros, a midwesterner as well as a Chicana, modeled the Mango Street neighborhood after her own Chicago neighborhood, and Amy Sickels surveys the body of Mango Street criticism. Felicia J. Cruz draws on reader-response theory to discuss how the novel is understood by readers of various social and ethnic backgrounds, and Catherine Leen examines how both Mango Street and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye oppose patriarchal systems.
Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets
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A New York Times bestseller! The 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Winner A Newbery Medalist and a Caldecott Honoree's New York Times best-selling ode to poets who have sparked a sense of wonder. Out of gratitude for the poet's art form, Newbery Award-winning author and poet Kwame Alexander, along with Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, present original poems that pay homage to twenty famed poets who have made the authors' hearts sing and their minds wonder. Stunning mixed-media images by Ekua Holmes, winner of a Caldecott Honor and a John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award, complete the celebration and invite the reader to listen, wonder, and perhaps even pick up a pen.
Woman Hollering Creek
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A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art
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Winner of the 2014 NACCS Tejas Non-Fiction Book Award This interdisciplinary study explores how US Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Through "negotiation"--a concept that accounts for artistic practices outside the duality of resistance/accommodation--and "self-fashioning," Marci R. McMahon demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today. Domestic Negotiations covers a range of archival sources and cultural productions, including the self-fashioning of the "chili queens" of San Antonio, Texas, Jovita González's romance novel Caballero, the home economics career and cookbooks of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Sandra Cisneros's "purple house controversy" and her acclaimed text The House on Mango Street, Patssi Valdez's self-fashioning and performance of domestic space in Asco and as a solo artist, Diane Rodríguez's performance of domesticity in Hollywood television and direction of domestic roles in theater, and Alma López's digital prints of domestic labor in Los Angeles. With intimate close readings, McMahon shows how Mexicanas and Chicanas shape domestic space to construct identities outside of gendered, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric.
From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print
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Chicana/o literature frequently depicts characters who exist in a vulnerable liminal space, living on the border between Mexican and American identities, and sometimes pushed to the edge by authorities who seek to restrict their freedom. As this groundbreaking new study reveals, the books themselves have occupied similarly precarious positions, as Chicana/o literature has struggled for economic viability and visibility on the margins of the American publishing industry, while Chicana/o writers have grappled with editorial practices that compromise their creative autonomy. From the Edge reveals the tangled textual histories behind some of the most cherished works in the Chicana/o literary canon, tracing the negotiations between authors, editors, and publishers that determined how these books appeared in print. Allison Fagan demonstrates how the texts surrounding the authors' words--from editorial prefaces to Spanish-language glossaries, from cover illustrations to reviewers' blurbs--have crucially shaped the reception of Chicana/o literature. To gain an even richer perspective on the politics of print, she ultimately explores one more border space, studying the marks and remarks that readers have left in the margins of these books. From the Edge vividly demonstrates that to comprehend fully the roles that ethnicity, language, class, and gender play within Chicana/o literature, we must understand the material conditions that governed the production, publication, and reception of these works. By teaching us how to read the borders of the text, it demonstrates how we might perceive and preserve the faint traces of those on the margins.
Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices
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"Home Girls makes an original, bold, and significant contribution to feminist studies, Chicana/o studies, and literature. Quintana accomplishes what few critics in Chicana/o studies have done: she applies different interpretive paradigms to her reading of Chicana texts, blending ethnography with literary criticism, ideological analysis with semiotics. Her reading of literary texts is rich in texture and detail." --Rosa Linda Fregoso, author of Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture Chicana writers in the United States write to inspire social change, to challenge a patriarchal and homophobic culture, to redefine traditional gender roles, to influence the future. Alvina E. Quintana examines how Chicana writers engage literary convention through fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiography as a means of addressing these motives. Her analysis of the writings of Gloria Anzaldua, Ana Castillo, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga addresses a multitude of issues: the social and political forces that influenced the Chicana aesthetic; Chicana efforts to open a dialogue about the limitation of both Anglo-American feminism and Chicano nationalism; experimentations with content and form; the relationship between imaginative writing and self-reflexive ethnography; and performance, domesticity, and sexuality. Employing anthropological, feminist, historical, and literary sources, Quintana explores the continuity found among Chicanas writing across varied genres--a drive to write themselves into being.
Latina and Latino Voices in Literature: Lives and Works
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This revised edition of an award-winning resource celebrates the lives and works of 35 Latina and Latino authors who write for today's young readers. Expanded to include 12 additional authors, updated information on the original 23 authors profiled, and 135 new titles, this comprehensive reference tool helps teachers, librarians, and parents stay current on one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary literature. Both established and emerging voices are profiled. Personal quotes and photographs introduce each biographical essay, presenting information gathered through interviews, personal communications, and research. A complete list of all books and works written by the author is included along with publication information. Annotations are provided for most of the titles, along with information on major themes, awards won, and recommended age levels. Evaluating Books for Bias provides helpful guidelines for examining and selecting books from a pluralistic perspective. Appendices offer further helpful information about the field, including special awards honoring books by Latinas and Latinos, a calendar of holidays and special days celebrated by the Latino community, and listings of related resources and organizations. The author has also compiled ideas for classroom activities and ways for librarians to extend the literary experience. A title index and extensive topic index--including themes, curricular areas, and genres--help in planning story sessions and study units. This is a multipurpose resource for anyone who wants to help young readers connect with contemporary literature in a meaningful way.
Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature
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Weaving strands of Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas explores political and theoretical agendas, particularly those that undermine the patriarchy, across a diverse range of Latina authors. Within this range, calls for a coalition are clear, but questions surrounding the process of these revolutionary dialogues provide important lines of inquiry. Examining the works of authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, Carmen Boullosa, and Helena María Viramontes, Anna Sandoval considers resistance to traditional cultural symbols and contemporary efforts to counteract negative representations of womanhood in literature and society. Offering a new perspective on the oppositional nature of Latina writers, Sandoval emphasizes the ways in which national literatures have privileged male authors, whose viewpoint is generally distinct from that of women--a point of departure rarely acknowledged in postcolonial theory. Applying her observations to the disciplinary, historical, and spatial facets of literary production, Sandoval interrogates the boundaries of the Latina experience. Building on the dialogues begun with such works as Sonia Saldivar-Hull's Feminism on the Border and Ellen McCracken's New Latina Narrative, this is a concise yet ambitious comparative approach to the historical and cultural connections (as well as disparities) found in Chicana and Mexicana literature.