From Library Journal
Once again, noteworthy critic Bloom (Yale and New York Univ. Graduate Sch.) has teamed with Chelsea House to create a literary series. This one is divided into six volumes, including the two-volume British Women Fiction Writers (to be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of LJ with Garland's Women Writers of Great Britain and Europe). Unfortunately, the remaining four volumes offer little that is new. Each volume is arranged alphabetically by writer (most of whom are already in the canon) and covers about a dozen authors in lengthy (seven- to 18-page) articles that provide a biographical statement, excerpts of critical opinion, and a bibliography of the writer's works. Each volume contains the same short introduction by Bloom focusing on the merits of feminist criticism. This duplication ignores the opportunity to explore the differences among women's cultural backgrounds and their works and sets up a mood that the extracted critical opinions do not follow. Appropriate only for public libraries lacking access to the indexes and journals where the criticism appears; the more inclusive A Library of Literary Criticism (Continuum, 1996) provides shorter and better-focused excerpts on more authors.?Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield P.L., Va.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
The writings of Asian-American women - whether born in America or transplanted from China, Japan, the Philippines, or India - have continued to reflect the complexities of their authors' cultural milieus, the stories set in places as disparate as Japanese internment camps in Arizona, flamboyant Manila under Marcos, and the Chinatowns of California. Likewise, these writings have continued to reflect the ambiguities of their authors' identities, the tensions of a female consciousness caught between cultures. The very voices of these stories - from Wong's polite autobiographical "she" and Yamamoto's "double telling" to the "splinters" in Kingston's voice and Hagedorn's polyglot - tell of the richness of writing by Asian-American women thus far.
