The Color Purple by Alice Walker My rating: 3 of 5 stars Alice Walker's 1982 Pulitzer-Prize-winning, Spielberg-filmed, Oprah-inspiring novel is a contentious contemporary classic. It remains widely read and loved but both the novel and its author have been scrutinized for every sin from New Age sentimentality to complicity with racism. In fewer than 300 … Continue reading Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Tag: sentimental literature
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities by Herman Melville My rating: 4 of 5 stars What was left of Melville's early audience was killed off by the dreadful Pierre, a year after Moby-Dick, and despite various modern salvage attempts, Pierre certainly is unreadable, in the old-fashioned sense of that now critically abused word. You just cannot get … Continue reading Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster My rating: 2 of 5 stars Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is a 1797 American epistolary seduction novel and a roman à clef about the death of Elizabeth Whitman (fictionally re-christened Eliza Wharton), a woman of the Connecticut gentry who is impregnated by a married man and who then … Continue reading Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette
