Shakespeare's division of experience

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Patrick Meanor

The St. Botolphs of Cheever's early stories and the upscale, Westchester-like towns - Shady Hill, Proxmire Manor, and Bullet Park - of his later work find their complex companions in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and John Updike's Rabbit's world. Cheever laid out the parameters of this creative world in his very first published story, "Expelled," which appeared in the New Republic in 1930 when Cheever was only 18. The young protagonist of this autobiographical story would be the first of many Cheever heroes to fall from what Meanor describes as "a condition of Edenic happiness and childlike innocence into the chaos and pain of adult knowledge." Moses Wapshot of Cheever's first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1958), Neddy Merrill of the critically acclaimed short story "The Swimmer" (1964), and even Zeke Farragut of Cheever's novel of redemption, Falconer (1977), struggle to reclaim some remnant of an earlier, lost happiness.

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Pin-chia Feng

This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the "politics of rememory" in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experiences of African- and Asian-American women. This book analyzes the working through of repressed memories in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung in these texts highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.

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Rebecca Smith

In this important study, Rebecca Smith (no relation to the author of this study) uses language theory and feminist critical theory to examine Lee Smith's "critique" of gender ideology in her fiction. This book charts Lee Smith's fictional exploration of the cultural devaluation of women and of the traditional romance plot. An in-depth look at Smith's appropriation of male myth, images and language, all of which she uses to deconstruct traditional gender arrangements, the work chronologically covers Lee Smith's first nine novels and her two short story collections.

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Stephen Engstrom

By developing an account of practical knowledge that situates Kant's ethics within his broader epistemology and rethinks numerous topics in his moral psychology and in his account of practical reason, this book promises to deepen and to reshape our understanding of Kantian ethics.