Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WOMEN WRITERS have certainly done well for themselves since the days of the 19th century novel. Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters worked their own powerful personalities into their fiction. But they struggled against a male-dominated society that saw writing as a recreation for women only if they were recognizable freaks like the Brontes, spinsters like Austen or "immoral" rebels like Eliot, who shocked London society by living with a man who was not her husband...
Critics charge that this complaining has become complaisant, excessively feminist, predictable. Bluebeard's Egg, the most recent collection of fiction by the Canadian, Margaret Atwood, may be a case in point...
...short stories, either structurally or psychologically. They are vignettish in quality, always descriptive, poetically introspective, featuring lots of big words. Carter, like Jorge Luis Borges, whom she has claimed as her major influence, has an exhausting vocabulary--more unknown words per story than in most other collections of short fiction in English...
...three years Roth spent writing The Counterlife have left him satisfied ("I gave it my all") and resigned to the prospect of being misunderstood once again. He expresses hope that Nathan's putative death in the novel will discourage people from reading his fiction as autobiography, but he is not optimistic. "I write about what could have happened," he says, "not what did happen. Why that's so hard to grasp I don't understand. I have once in a while started off just setting down some incident I'd actually gone through and I can hardly get past...
Nathan Zuckerman lives, dies and lives again in Philip Roth's The Counterlife, a novel that explores the truth about fiction...