The Critical Response to Joan Didion: (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters)

Joan Didion is a major contemporary American novelist and journalist whose works have popular appeal and are widely studied from a variety of literary perspectives as well as for philosophical, psychological, and political insights into the times and topics with which they deal. This volume collects an extensive range of critical commentary, both reviews and scholarly examinations, including newly commissioned essays, covering the entire canon: four works of fiction and five of nonfiction published between 1963 and 1992. Individually, the selections explore diverse critical approaches to Didion's canon; collectively, they establish a critical map that will serve as a guide to future scholarship. A substantive introduction assesses the canon and the critical reaction to it. Other features include a brief chronology of Didion's accomplishments, a bibliography, and contributors and subject indexes.

Table of Contents:
Series Foreword by Cameron Northouse Introduction by Sharon Felton Run River New Yorker review Playing it Rough by Thomas Hinde The Journey Nowhere: Didion's Run River by Jennifer L. Randisi Run River: A Western Story of Paradise Lost by Michelle Loris Slouching Towards Bethlehem From Hippies to Hawaii by Gerald Meyer Her Heart's with the Wagon Trains by Melvin Maddocks Joan Didion's Dreampolitics of the Self by Evan Carton The Cat in the Shimmer by Chris Anderson Play It As It Lays Atlantic review by Phoebe-Lou Adams A Treatment of the Theme of Social Disintegration by Peter Dollard Novels and Nothingness by Mark Schorer The Dissociation of Self in Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays by Rodney Simard Making Sense and Telling Stories: Problems of Cognition and Narration in Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays by Sandra K. Hinchman A Book of Common Prayer Kirkus Reviews review America review by Elizabeth Woods Shaw Didion's Grace by Peter Prescott Through Greene-land in Drag: Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer by Patricia Merivale Joan Didion: Witnessing the Abyss by Samuel Chase Coale The White Album Atlantic review by Phoebe-Lou Adams Pictures from an Expedition by Martha Duffy Joan Didion's Symbolic Landscapes by Merritt Mosley The Poetics of Joan Didion's Journalism by Mark Z. Muggli Salvador Salvadorean Nights by David Leppard A Culture of Fear by Juan E. Corradi Snap Books by Michael Massing To El Salvador by Lynne Hanley Democracy Atlantic review by Phoebe-Lou Adams Library Journal review by Janet E. Wiehe An American Education by Thomas R. Edwards American Spectator review by Thomas Mallon The Political Vision of Joan Didion's Democracy by Michael Tager Joan Didion and the Presence of Absence by Janis P. Stout Miami Choice review by J. Raferty Didion's Miami and Multiple Realities by Ruth Walker The Mirage of Miami by Nicholas Lemann Didion's Political Tropics: Miami and the Basis for Community by Sandra K. Hinchman After Henry Didion Moves East but Remains at Home in the Essay by John Lownsbrough American Spectator review by Christopher Caldwell Actual Experience, Preferred Narratives: Didion's After Henry by Laura Julier Bibliography Contributors Index Subject Index

About the Author :
SHARON FELTON is a specialist in modern and contemporary American and British literature and women's writing. Now teaching in Canada, she was Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Waterbury. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Hollins Critic, Connecticut Review, Mississippi Quarterly, American Literature, Studies in the Humanities, Modern Fiction Studies, and other journals.