Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic
Brenda Beckman-Long
Throughout her literary and critical career, Canadian writer Carol Shields (1935–2003) resisted simple categorization. Her novels are elegant puzzles that confront the reader with the ambiguity of meaning and narrative, yet their position within Shields’ critical feminist project has, until now, been obscured.
In Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic, Brenda Beckman-Long illuminates that project through the study of Shields’ extensive oeuvre, including her fiction and criticism. Beckman-Long brings depth to her analysis through close readings of six novels, including the award-winning The Stone Diaries. Elliptical, open-ended, and concerned with women writing about women, these novels reveal Shields’ critique of dominant ... Read more
A much needed reappraisal of Shields’s innovative work, Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic contributes to the scholarship on life writing and autobiography, literary criticism, and feminist and critical theory.
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About Brenda Beckman-Long
Reviews for Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic
Gillian Roberts, University of Nottingham
Contemporary Women's Writing, 12:3, Nov 2018
"…a valuable contemporary reappraisal, convincingly arguing that for Shields writing is a social and political act…"
Carol Ann Howells, University of London/University of Reading ... Read more