Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Tyler, Anne (Vol. 205) - Paul Christian Jones (essay date spring 2003)

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Paul Christian Jones (essay date spring 2003)

SOURCE: Jones, Paul Christian. “A Re-Awakening: Anne Tyler's Postfeminist Edna Pontellier in Ladder of Years.” Critique 44, no. 3 (spring 2003): 271-83.

[In the following essay, Jones perceives Ladder of Years as a “postfeminist revision” of Kate Chopin's The Awakening.]

Following the 1995 publication of Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, familiar comments about the author's much-debated stance on feminist issues once again appeared in book reviews. For example, in the Yale Review, Lorrie Moore described the Baltimore of Tyler's novel as “a land and time unto itself, untouched by such things as feminism […] or politics of any kind” (141). Brooke Allen, in the New Criterion, lamented that Tyler's characters “seem eerily untouched by any of the revolutions, be they sexual or feminist, of the last forty years.” Additionally, Allen complained, “Not...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Sanjukta Dasgupta (essay date winter 1997)
   2. Elizabeth Mahn Nollen (essay date 1997)
   3. James Grove (essay date 1997)
   4. Linda Simon (review date August 1998)
   5. Joyce R. Durham (essay date fall 1998)
   6. Cheryl Devon Coleman (essay date summer 2000)
   7. Nora Foster Stovel (review date January 2001)
   8. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson (essay date spring 2001)
   9. Anita Brookner (review date 2 June 2001)
   10. Ellen Cronan Rose (review date July 2001)
   11. Rita D. Jacobs (review date spring 2002)
   12. Barbara Harrell Carson (essay date fall-winter 2002)
   13. Paul Christian Jones (essay date spring 2003)
   14. Publishers Weekly (review date 22 December 2003)
   15. Anita Brookner (review date 3 January 2004)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Anne Tyler