Barbara Kingsolver's World: Nature, Art, and the Twenty-First Century, Revised Edition

by Linda Wagner-Martin

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798765113820
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/16/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emerita at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the author or editor of over 50 books, including Toni Morrison, A Literary Life (Macmillan, 2015), The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (ed. with Cathy N. Davidson, Oxford University Press, 1995), and Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit (Bloomsbury 2015, 2021 2nd ed). She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Hubbell Medal from the Modern Language Association. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, at Rollins College, at Bellagio and at Bogliasco. She has served as president of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the American Literature Division of the Modern Language Association. She has won many teaching awards, particularly at Michigan State University and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
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).

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Flight Behavior: Dellarobia's Bildungsroman
2. The Innocence of The Bean Trees
3. 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 Apex
9. The Prodigality of Prodigal Summer
10. Traveling to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
11. Small Wonder: Staying Alive and the Bellweather Prizes
12. The Lacuna
13. Flight Behavior, Our Bildungsroman
14. Unsheltered
15. Demon Copperhead

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

One of the most insightful-and prolific-of American literary scholars, Linda Wagner-Martin here offers an excellent eco-critical 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 of Humanities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

“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 it 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 English, The College at Brockport, SUNY, USA

From the Publisher