by Diana Tixier Herald (1995)
This guide for librarians begins by placing readers' advisory services in the library into context, reviewing related theory and research, and explaining how the landscape of genre plays a central role in readers' advisory service. After a section on basic techniques used by readers' advisors to provide good service to patrons, the book delves into 14 genres, including the usual romance, Western, and literary fiction genres, but also covering less common genres such as Christian fiction, urban fiction, and women's fiction, as well as nonfiction. Each chapter describes the genre's characteristics and supplies lists of currently significant titles, must-reads, five fan faves, and 20-30 benchmark titles. --Publisher's description.
Alexandra W. Schultheis
"In Regenerative Fiction, Alexandra W. Schultheis brings postcolonial and psychoanalytic theories together to explore this tumultuous zone, a place that is at once cutting edge, open wound, and sutured scar. This analysis of the authors' political and aesthetic strategies reveals fissures in the ruling ideology of subject and nation as well as immanent resistance to it."--Jacket.
Maxine Lavon Montgomery
In this exploration of the relationship between biblical apocalypse and black fiction, Maxine Montgomery argues that American writers see apocalyptic events in an intermediate and secular sense, as a tenable response to racial oppression. This work analyzes the characters, plots, and themes of seven novels that rely on the apocalyptic trope.
Carlos Fuentes
"In this essay, Carlos Fuentes proposes an exciting journey through the evolution of the Latin American novelan expedition that spans over six centuries, from the discovery of the Americas to this day. Those who embark on this trip will come across the greatest Latin American literary figures, their constant themes, and the penchant to cannibalize and carnivalize history to create literary and artistic forms that come together paying no regard to rules or genres. An authoritative work of reference and study, the essay covers names such as Borges, Neruda, Cortazar, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sandoval, Zapata, Gorostiza, and Lezama Lima."--Amazon.com.
Jana Evans Braziel
"By exploring the breadth of Jamaica Kincaid's writings, this book reveals her work's transmutations of genre, specifically those of autobiography, biography, and history in relation to the forces of creation and destruction in the Caribbean. Jana Evans Braziel examines Kincaid's preoccupation with genealogy, genesis, and genocide in the Caribbean; her adaptations of biblical texts for her literary oeuvre; and her authorial deployments of the diabolic as frames for both rethinking the boundaries of genre and altering notions of subjectivity, objectivity, self, and other." --Book Jacket.