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Palgrave Macmillan

Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction

  • Book
  • © 2016

Overview

  • Analyzes in depth how ritual shapes the performance of culture, gender, and language in texts by Chicana women
  • Offers a compelling synthesis of literary theory with spiritual, nationalist, communal, and feminist medical principles to read Chicana feminist fiction
  • Provides an original theoretical approach to a range of Chicana authors, from Denise Chavez to Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo.

Part of the book series: Literatures of the Americas (LOA)

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This book argues for the necessary and further examination of the sacred as it is ritualized within Chicana fiction. It suggests that religious, spiritual, linguistic and political symbolisms reveal rites that structure narrative performances of coping with and healing from trauma. Helane Androne examines these rites of spirit, service, and story as they occur in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, Denise Chávez’s Face of An Angel, and Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo. Beginning with the implications of Gloria Anzaldúa’s spiritual vision of Chicana identity alongside structural principles of ritual criticism, this study extends the discourse about the impact of the sacred in Chicana fiction. an>

Reviews

“Approaching Chicana fiction from the field of ritual criticism, Helane Androne navigates familiar ground with groundbreaking, innovative methodological instruments to shows us new angles. This alone makes for an exciting reading of the de-colonial, egalitarian impetus behind Chicana literature. Each chapter provides a different optic for recognizing the dimensions of ritualization and performance and reveals a process of becoming that is larger than bildungsroman. Thoughtful and provocative, this book brings what is easily obscured in literary studies into full presence.” (Clara Román-Odio, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature, Kenyon College, USA, and author of “Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Productions”)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Miami University, Cincinnati, USA

    Helane Androne

About the author

Helane Androne is Professor of English and directs the Ohio Writing Project at Miami University, USA. She is the author of Multiethnic American Literatures: Essays for Teaching Context and Culture and has published in journals such as PedagogyMELUS, and Phoebe.

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