San Antonio College Library

"The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her equally beautiful and cruel mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world, as shown here in this collection of "Snow White" tales. In Switzerland you might hear about seven dwarfs who shelter a girl, only to be murdered by robbers. In Armenia a mother orders her husband to kill his daughter because the moon has declared her "the most beautiful of all." The...

In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote that the mother-daughter bond is the great unwritten story, awaiting analysis and definition. Since then, many voices have come to fill the gap, including those of American fiction writers. This bibliography provides information on short stories that explore the mother-daughter relationship. The general introduction and the annotations analyze approximately 250 stories written by American women in the 20th century. Most...

From the Freudians to the feminists, the role of the absent or hidden father figure has played a part in narrative and cultural theory. This work presents the first full-length examination of the absent father in modern drama. It closely analyzes major works by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Williams, Miller, Shepard, Rabe, Henley, Norman, Pielmeier, Shaffer, Osborne, Churchill, and Fugard. Using the critical framework of psychological, deconstructive,...

Analyzes the plot, setting, characters, themes, and symbolism in Hawthorne's novel, and discusses the purpose of its "Custom-house" portion.

"Through careful research that draws on recent scholarship about female adolescent development, Declarations of Independence situates this shift to a stronger female protagonist within a larger cultural context. The empowered girls in this book are defined through stories of historical and multicultural fiction, social realism, romance and adventure, fantasy, and memoir - with emphasis on books published after 1990. The result is a collection of modern...

The introduction to this volume outlines the critical history of the novel from the moralising reactions of Hawthorne's contemporaries, through the assessments of writers such as Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, to the more recent approaches of the New Criticism, formalism, psychoanalytical criticism, structuralism and feminism. Each of the interpretative essays that follow places The Scarlet Letter in a specific historical and cultural context. The...

Critical essays on the character Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The scarlet letter."