Barbara Kingsolver

by Linda Wagner-Martin, Harold Bloom (Editor), David King Dunaway (Foreword by)

Book by Wagner-Martin, Linda, David King Dunaway

142 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 2004

About the author

Linda Wagner-Martin is the Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emerita at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Over a teaching career spanning 53 years, she taught at Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and UNC, while authoring and editing more than 55 books. Her work includes biographies of major literary figures such as Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou, along with studies like A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present and The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism. After retiring in 2011, she continued publishing extensively. Wagner-Martin’s contributions have earned her prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Service to American Literature, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute. She holds BA, BS, MA, and PhD degrees from Bowling Green State University, where she graduated magna cum laude with majors in English and minors in American History.

Reviews

[Jessica Biggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barbara Kingsolver is my favorite author, and so I am bound to like any book reviewing her work. However, I liked how Barbara Kingsolver's World viewed her work from an ecological, feminist, racial, political, and community based perspective. I have read many reviewers discredit Kingsolver due to her obvious political viewpoints on climate change and government, and so I found it refreshing to read a book about her work that praises this aspect.

Barbara Kingsolver's World reviewed all of her work in depth, and discussed the issues she was bringing forth, as well as how she discussed her work in the media and on her webpage. I found the book to be very well researched, and it enlightened me to a lot of things I did not notice while reading her novels.

There was one thing that I disagreed with the author on, and that is the last chapter of The Poisonwood Bible and what it represents. I have always read that chapter through the eyes of Ruth May looking down from the trees, as that is the place she passed away. The author had a different viewpoint. That is what makes literature so special though; the ability to read the same thing and view it in different ways.

Overall, this is a must-read only for those die-hard Barbara Kingsolver fans like myself.