Amy Tan: A Literary CompanionMcFarland, Incorporated, Publishers, 2004 M09 9 - 240 pages In the mid-1980s, Amy Tan was a successful but unhappy corporate speechwriter. By the end of the decade, she was perched firmly atop the best-seller lists with The Joy Luck Club, with more popular novels to follow. Tan's work--once pigeonholed as ethnic literature--resonates with universal themes that cross cultural and ideological boundaries, and prove wildly successful with readers of all stripes. Tender, sincere, complex, honest and uncompromising in its portrayal of Chinese culture and its affect on women, Amy Tan's work earned her both praise and excoriation from critics, adoration from fans, and a place as one of America's most notable modern writers. This reference work introduces and summarizes Amy Tan's life, her body of literature, and her characters. The main text is comprised of entries covering characters, dates, historical figures and events, allusions, motifs and themes from her works. The entries combine critical insights with generous citations from primary and secondary sources. Each entry concludes with a selected bibliography. There is also a chronology of Tan's family history and her life. Appendices provide an overlapping timeline of historical and fictional events in Tan's work; a glossary of foreign terms found in her writing; and a list of related writing and research topics. An extensive bibliography and a comprehensive index accompany the text. |
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... story of the rape and forced concubinage of An - mei Hsu's mother actually occurred to the author's maternal grandmother , Gu Jingmei , the widow of a scholar . The grandmother also donated a strip of flesh to heal a dying mother , an ...
... story without making significant impact . Clifford St. Clair , as compared with his daughter Lena St. Clair , seems largely clueless about the mental aberrations of his depressed wife Ying - ying . Even less important to the story are ...
... story The tradition of passing family anecdotes , subjective narratives , testimonies , morality tales , and fables from parent to child tends to focus on warnings , confes ... story aids both the teller and the hearer talk - story 164.
Contents
Acknowledgments | 1 |
Chronology of Tans Family History Life and Works | 7 |
Tans Genealogy | 31 |
Copyright | |
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