Everyday Use Sparknotes
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Everyday Use
Presents the text of Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use"; contains background essays that provide insight into the story; and features a selection of critical response. Includes a chronology and an interview with the author.
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf's seminal essay, "A Room of One's Own," is a pioneering exploration of the intersection between gender and literary creation. Utilizing a stream-of-consciousness narrative style, Woolf weaves together personal anecdotes, fiction, and socio-political commentary to assert that women require financial independence and personal space to cultivate their creativity. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century feminist thought, this work serves as both a manifesto and meditative piece, dissecting the historical barriers that have hindered women's contributions to literature and society, while advocating for their rightful place in the artistic canon. Woolf, a key figure in the modernist movement, crafted this essay drawing from her extensive experiences in the Bloomsbury Group and her immersion in the literary realm. Her awareness of the limitations imposed on women in literature, coupled with her personal struggles as an author, profoundly influenced her arguments. Woolf's unique ability to synthesize personal reflection with broader societal critique makes her work not only a reflection of her era but also a lasting statement on the enduring complexities of gender. A must-read for anyone interested in feminist literature, "A Room of One's Own" invites readers to contemplate the social constructs surrounding creativity and gender. Woolf's eloquent prose and incisive observations illuminate the obstacles faced by women writers, making this text essential for understanding the evolution of literary discourse and the imperative for inclusive representation in all artistic endeavors.
Kindred
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.") The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).