Barbara Kingsolver's World

A revised edition of Linda Wagner-Martin's comprehensive study of the novels, stories, essays and poetry of American author Barbara Kingsolver. Now updated so that coverage runs from Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, through to her most recent, Demon Copperhead. Author of the only biography of Barbara Kingsolver and of a reader’s guide to The Poisonwood Bible, Wagner-Martin has become the leading authority on this Pulitzer-prize-wining author. Here she covers every work in Kingsolver’s oeuvre, emphasizing the writer’s blend of the scientific method in which she was formally trained with her convincing understanding of the human characters that fill her books. What Kingsolver achieves throughout all her writing is a seamless blending of the various parts of human existence. She melds important themes through parts and pieces of the natural world—the African snakes, the Monarch butterflies, the coyotes in Deanna Wolfe’s existence. Repeatedly Kingsolver writes to create both characters and the characters’ worlds, bringing all these pieces into masterful, and whole, realities.This edition includes two new chapters - one on her 2018 novel, Unsheltered, and the second on her 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead - and is the first study of Kingsolver to publish since she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emerita at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the author or editor of over 50 books, including Toni Morrison, A Literary Life (Macmillan, 2015), The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (ed. with Cathy N. Davidson, Oxford University Press, 1995), and Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit (Bloomsbury 2015, 2021 2nd ed). She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Hubbell Medal from the Modern Language Association. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, at Rollins College, at Bellagio and at Bogliasco. She has served as president of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the American Literature Division of the Modern Language Association. She has won many teaching awards, particularly at Michigan State University and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.