Kirjahaku

Critiques such stories as "The House of Spirits" and "Daughter of Fortune," while providing biographical information about the Latin American author.

Isabel Allende--"la Famosa" to her fellow Chileans--is the world's most widely read Spanish language author. Her career coincides with the emergence of multiculturalism and global feminism, and her powerfully honest, revelatory works touch the pulse points of humankind. Her bravura study of the interwoven roles of women in family history opens the minds of outsiders to the sufferings of women and their children during years of social and political nightmare. This reference work provides an introduction to Allende's life as well as a guided overview of her body of work. Designed for the fan and scholar alike, this text features an alphabetized, fully-annotated listing of major terms in the Allende canon, including fictional characters, motifs, historical events and themes. A comprehensive index is included.

The border between fact and fiction has always been a porous one for Isabel Allende. Her acclaimed first novel, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather yet is filled with ghosts and green-haired and clairvoyant women; her memoir Paula, though ostensibly nonfiction, is a moving and highly imaginative account of her family history and the illness and death of her daughter, Paula. Even in the many interviews she has given, Allende has embellished the details of her life to captivate and charm her readers. She has more than succeeded. Around the world, readers have flocked to both her fiction and her nonfiction, making her one of the best-selling women novelists in the world today. Edited and with an introduction by John Rodden, a celebrated Allende scholar, this volume in the Critical Insights series brings together a variety of essays on this Chilean Scheherazade. Rodden's introduction assesses the phases of Allende's career and her growth as a writer, and Michael Wood, writing on behalf of The Paris Review, considers Allende's relation to magical realism. Amanda Hopkinson, in turn, provides a comprehensive biography of Allende and a measured examination of how her life has informed her work.For students encountering Allende for the first time, four introductory essays provide a valuable framework for studying her in greater depth. Beth E. Jörgenson surveys the range of critical opinions and the major strands of critical thought on Allende's work, and Charles Rossman's close reading of The House of the Spirits analyzes in depth the novel's setting, characters, and plot. María Roof compares Allende's use of the family saga novel to Maryse Condé's, and Carrie Sheffield describes the context in which Allende wrote her first and most popular novel, The House of the Spirits.Next, a collection of essays on key works and subjects deepens readers' understanding of Allende. The House of the Spirits is treated by Sara E. Cooper, who uses family systems theory to explicate the novel's major themes, and Barbara Foley Buedel considers the magical realist aspects of Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna. Linda S. Maier and Cherie Meacham both explore Paula, with Maier focusing on how the memoir acted as a catharsis for Allende and Meacham relating the work to The House of the Spirits.Allende's prequels to The House of the Spirits—Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia—are then taken up by John Rodden and Nadia Avendaño. Rodden examines the autobiographical facets of both novels while Avendaño considers how Allende breaks down gender barriers in Daughter of Fortune. Linda Gould Levine extends Avendaño's insights with a broad study of how Allende has transgressed boundaries of race, class, gender, and nationality throughout her career. Vincent Kling seeks to overturn the common perception of Allende as little more than a popular novelist by revealing how she continually draws on myth, archetype, and paradox to lend depth and nuance to her writing.A quartet of essays then treat a few of Allende's lesser known works. Philip Swanson examines Zorro, while Luz María Umpierre analyzes one of the short stories, "Two Words." Don Latham discusses the magical realist facets of Allende's young adult novels, and John Rodden considers Allende's self-presentation in her interviews.Rounding out the volume are a chronology of Allende's life and a list of her principal publications as well as a bibliography for readers seeking to study this fascinating author in greater depth.Finally, the volume's appendixes offer a section of useful reference resources:A chronology of the author's lifeA complete list of the author's works and their original dates of publicationA general bibliographyA detailed paragraph on the volume's editorNotes on the individual chapter authorsA subject index

The source of the narrative energy that creates such absorbing stories. Allende's very popular novels have attracted both critical approval and opprobrium, often at the expense of genuine analysis. This sophisticated study explores the narrative architecture of Allende's House of the Spirits [1982], Daughter of Fortune [1999], and Portrait in Sepia [2000] as a trilogy, proposing that the places created in these novels subvert the patriarchal norms that have governed politics, sexuality, and ethnicity. Rooted in the Foucauldian premise that the history of space is essentially the history of power, and supported by Susan Stanford Friedman's cultural geographies of encounter as well as Gloria Anzaldúa's study of borderlands, this study shows that, by rejecting traditional spatial hierarchies, Allende's trilogy systematically deterritorializes the elite while shifting the previously marginalized to the physical and thematic centers of her works. This movement provides the narrative energy which draws the reader into Allende's universe, and sustains the 'good story' for which she has been universally acclaimed. KAREN WOOLEY MARTIN is Associate Professor of Spanish at Union University, Jackson, Tennessee.

This revised edition has been updated to cover Allende's three newest books-City of the Beasts, Portrait in Sepia: A Novel, and Daughter of Fortune. It includes four new interviews in which Allende discusses completing her trilogy of novels that began with House of the Spirits, as well as her ongoing spiritual adventure and political interests.

This book explores the concept of displacement in the fiction produced by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende between 1982 and 2000. Displacement, understood in the author’s analysis to encompass social, geographical, linguistic and cultural phenomena, is argued to play a consistently central role in Allende’s fictional output of this period. Close readings of Allende’s texts illustrate the abiding importance of displacement and reconcile two apparently contradictory trends in her writing: as the settings of her fiction have become more international, questions of individual identity have gained in importance. This discussion employs displacement as a means of engaging with critical debates both on Allende’s individual texts and on her status as an original writer. After examining in detail the seven works of fiction written by Allende during this period, the book concludes with reflections on the general trajectory of her work in this genre.