Women Shapeshifters: Transforming the Contemporary Novel

This study presents an exciting new approach to novels that combine the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of contemporary life. Women are the prototypical Other in partiarchal societies, as can be seen in the first four novelists - Eudora Welty, Gloria Naylor, Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing - who are primarily known as realists but who disrupt out expectations to shift our perspective. Moreover, Shinn analyses how Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Cade Bambara write out their consciousness as hyphenated Americans about what is necessary to achieve an integrated self and an integrated society. Shinn explores how these women have expanded not only the language but the very structure of their novels and have transformed the novelistic tradition.