[In this] thorough book-by-book analysis ... readers receive ample guidance concerning the plots, characters, and themes of each of Kingsolver's novels and stories.
Contemporary Women's Writing
In this landmark study, Linda Wagner-Martin traces Barbara Kingsolver's evolution into an author whose work fully synthesizes fiction and ecology. Reading Kingsolver's essays and interviews alongside her novels, Wagner-Martin delves into what ... Read moreit means to be an ecological writer. Scholars will find Barbara Kingsolver's World to be foundational, and general readers will appreciate its insights into the writings of a fascinating living author.
Jennifer Haytock, Professor and Chair of the English Department, The College at Brockport, SUNY, USA
In a landmark new study, Professor Wagner-Martin fuses discussion of Barbara Kingsolver's use of different lines of scientifically-based knowledge with readings of her fourteen books. While other critics persist in pigeonholing Kingsolver's work, Wagner-Martin expertly manoeuvres Kingsolver's dexterity of genres to provide a comprehensive study of the full range of her oeuvre. A model of scholarly agility and critical sensitivity, Barbara Kingsolver's World: Nature, Art, and the Twenty-First Century is essential reading.
Laura Rattray, Reader in American Literature, University of Glasgow, UK
One of the most insightful
and prolific
of American literary scholars, Linda Wagner-Martin here offers an excellent ecocritical reading of Barbara Kingsolver's work, written in Wagner-Martin's lucid, accessible prose. Focusing on what she calls the reciprocity between the human and the natural, Wagner-Martin discusses natural elements even in those Kingsolver works
such as The Lacuna
that are usually viewed as political novels. She is especially good on Kingsolver's new and strangely foreboding Flight Behavior.
Fred Hobson, Professor of English and Lineberger Distinguished Professor Humanities, The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA
Provides detailed analysis of each of Kingsolver's novels as well as discussion of her non-fiction writing and poetry ... Tracing thematic elements that appear across texts, including working-class women's labour, motherhood and parenting, interracial working-class communities and tensions, and community responses to social injustice as well as environmental devastation, Wagner-Martin ultimately provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the import of Kingsolver's work. Because she situates her readings at the conclusions of chapters within recent critical debates, her monograph also provides nice coverage of up-to-date commentary on Kingsolver's connection to women's literary history and the political novel of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
This Year's Work in English Studies
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