Haunted by the memories of her powerfully destructive mother, Jamaica Kincaid is a writer out of necessity. Born Elaine Potter Richardson, Kincaid grew up in the West Indies in the shadow of her deeply contemptuous and abusive mother, Annie Drew. Drawing heavily on Kincaid's many remarks on the autobiographical sources of her writings, J. Brooks Bouson investigates the ongoing construction of Kincaid's autobiographical and political identities. She focuses attention on what many critics find so enigmatic and what lies at the heart of Kincaid's fiction and nonfiction work: the "mother mystery." Bouson demonstrates, through careful readings, how Kincaid uses her writing to transform her feelings of shame into pride as she wins the praise of an admiring critical establishment and an ever-growing reading public.

Quiet As It's Kept draws on and extends recent psychoanalytic and psychiatric work of shame and trauma theorists to offer an in-depth analysis of Toni Morrison's representation of painful and shameful race matters in her fiction. Providing a frank and sustained look at the troubling, if not distressing, aspects of Morrison's fiction that other critics have studiously avoided or minimized in their commentaries, this book challenges established views of Morrison, showing her to be an author who forces readers into uncomfortable confrontations with matters of race. In Quiet As It's Kept, J. Brooks Bouson explores these issues in Morrison's works The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise.

Morrison, Nobel prize-winning author, has viewed part of her cultural and literary task as a writer to bear witness to the plight of black Americans. "Quiet as it's kept, much of our business, our existence here, has been grotesque. It really has", she has commented. As she exposes to public view sensitive race matters in her fiction, Morrison presents jarring depictions of the trauma of slavery and the horrors of racist oppression and black-on-black violence.

This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls "embodied shame," J. Brooks Bouson describes older women's shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture. Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.

This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls "embodied shame," J. Brooks Bouson describes older women's shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture. Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.

In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpiecesGCo The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake. Providing new critical assessments of Atwood's novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood's ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied herGCoranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environmentGCobut also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility.

This is a collection of original essays by well-known Atwood scholars offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of three well known Atwood texts. In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpieces - "The Robber Bride", "The Blind Assassin", and "Oryx and Crake". Providing new critical assessments of Atwood's novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood's ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied her - ranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environment - but also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advance undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.

In a series of important studies, American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut focused attention on a fundamental aspect of human behavior: the desire each person feels for a sense of relationship with and empathic responsiveness from others. This book offers the first sustained application of Kohut's work to the study of literature and sheds new light on the complex nature of interactions between texts and readers. J. Brooks Bouson investigates nine representative narcissistic characters from works by Atwood, Bellow, Conrad, Dotosevsky, Kafka, Lessing, Mann, and Woolf. Combining a careful examination of individual characters and texts with an analysis of the critical commentaries they have generated, Bouson makes us aware of the narcissistic dramas encoded in texts, dramas that are often unconsciously replicated by critics in their interpretive narratives. In an essential way, Bouson writes, the meaning of literary work grows out of the empathic event that occurs between the reader and the text. The book establishes a place for Kohut's self psychology in the study of literature and provides a refreshing perspective on the empathic dynamics of the reading and critical processes.