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A revised edition of Linda Wagner-Martin''s comprehensive study of the novels, stories, essays and poetry of American author Barbara Kingsolver. Now updated so that coverage runs from Kingsolver''s first novel, The Bean Trees, through to her most recent, Demon Copperhead . Author of the only biography of Barbara Kingsolver and of a reader''s guide to The Poisonwood Bible, Wagner-Martin has become the leading authority on this Pulitzer-prize-wining author. Here she covers every work in Kingsolver''s oeuvre , emphasizing the writer''s blend of the scientific method in which she was formally trained with her convincing understanding of the human characters that fill her books. What Kingsolver achieves throughout all her writing is a seamless blending of the various parts of human existence. She melds important themes through parts and pieces of the natural world-the African snakes, the Monarch butterflies, the coyotes in Deanna Wolfe''s existence. Repeatedly Kingsolver writes to create both characters and the characters'' worlds, bringing all these pieces into masterful, and whole, realities.This edition includes two new chapters - one on her 2018 novel, Unsheltered , and the second on her 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead - and is the first study of Kingsolver to publish since she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.>
List of contents
Preface
1.
Flight Behavior: Dellarobia's Bildungsroman
2. The Innocence of
The Bean Trees3.
Three Pigs in Heaven and Its Interrogation
4.
Animal Dreams, a Prototypical Ecological Novel
5. The Fiction of Kingsolver's Non-novels
6. Kingsolver as Essayist-A Different Expertise
7. Seven Kingsolver as Poet
8.
The Poisonwood Bible as Apex9. The Prodigality of
Prodigal Summer10. Traveling to
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life11.
Small Wonder: Staying Alive and the Bellweather Prizes
12.
The Lacuna13.
Flight Behavior, Our Bildungsroman
14.
Unsheltered15.
Demon CopperheadBibliography
Index
About the author
Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She was the 2011 recipient of the Hubbell Medal for lifetime service in American literature (sponsored by the MLA), and has received the Guggenheim fellowship, the senior National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, the Bunting Institute fellowship, and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Philosophical Association and others. She has published more than eighty-five books of criticism, some edited, including Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987) and “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (1995), as well as studies of Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. Recent books are A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present (2013) and Toni Morrison and the Maternal (2014).
