Radiant Daughters: Fictional American Women (Contributions in Women's Studies) - Hardcover

"New directions in feminist literary criticism are clearly evident in Shinn's analysis of fictional American women from the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s. Shinn persuasively argues that the work is a study of the human condition because women characters reflect common human concerns in contemporary society. She offers an analysis of numerous women characters drawn by various writers, among them Saul Bellow, Hortense Calisher, Shirley Jackson, John Updike, and Carson McCullers. Echoing Emerson, she notes that each decade writes its own books, thus each generation defines the human condition within the social context. Shinn traces the evolution from the 1940s when women characters represented bitches or burdens to male characters rebelling against the forces and demands of society, to the revolution of the 1960s, when the fragmented selves of women began to mend. In an afterword on the 1970s and 1980s, Shinn sees maturation, a search for community on the part of both female and male characters as equal victims of a dehumanizing society. Endnotes, bibliography, and index are excellent. Highly recommended for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates."-Choice

?New directions in feminist literary criticism are clearly evident in Shinn's analysis of fictional American women from the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s. Shinn persuasively argues that the work is a study of the human condition because women characters reflect common human concerns in contemporary society. She offers an analysis of numerous women characters drawn by various writers, among them Saul Bellow, Hortense Calisher, Shirley Jackson, John Updike, and Carson McCullers. Echoing Emerson, she notes that each decade writes its own books, thus each generation defines the human condition within the social context. Shinn traces the evolution from the 1940s when women characters represented bitches or burdens to male characters rebelling against the forces and demands of society, to the revolution of the 1960s, when the fragmented selves of women began to mend. In an afterword on the 1970s and 1980s, Shinn sees maturation, a search for community on the part of both female and male characters as equal victims of a dehumanizing society. Endnotes, bibliography, and index are excellent. Highly recommended for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates.?-Choice