The Bell Jar | Literary Precedents
Viewed as a sensitive youth's initiation into the ills of the world, The Bell Jar stands squarely in a tradition that looks back to works like Voltaire's Candide (1759) and such examples of the Kiinstlerroman ("artist novel") as James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Among more recent works, the novel has prompted comparisons with Hannah Green's best-selling I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), an altogether less subtle story of an impressionable girl's stay in a mental hospital. Most commonly, however, Esther Greenwood has...
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