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

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

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. “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 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).