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Now that I managed to sequay the discussion over to Woolf, I would like to throw out the issue she raises in A Room Of One's Own, which really pertains to writing in general.  She argues that anger interferes with the best of writing for, she says, the mind must be empty of interferences to create--incandescent is the word she uses I think. Of course she rather contradicts herself, for that work is all about anger, but that work is not a piece of fiction either--it's an essay. In any case, every time I teach it (including this past week), students protest that great literature can come out of anger.  And hmmm, I think, what great piece has been produced through anger?  Eliot would say such emotion needs an objective correlative to carry it, or the piece will fail (such as, in his view, Hamlet failed).  In any case, maybe Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper is an example of something written out of anger, not an incandescent mind, and succeeding quite well.

How about Catch 22? The Grapes of Wrath?  Narrative of the Life of a Slave? Sula?  Beloved?  The Beat poets...here I am thinking especially of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." 

Anger seems to be at the root of lots of good, even great, literature to me.  

Yes, certainly there are many pieces.  Eliot's point concerns a modernist aesthetic, and Woolf wanted to make a political point about women. But she didn't say good literature doesn't contain anger--she said the best literature, such as Shakespeare's is born of a mind free of anger (at the time of creation).  Morrison's literature would receive my vote in terms of being great, although maybe not the others. In any case, contemporary literature leaves traces of the author all through it, and with the memoir so popular, and the boundary between fiction and non-fiction so blurred, the discussion of the whole matter has changed much. 

Although it's almost thirty years old, Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic addresses the issue of the angry female author and how this anger plays out in their texts. They do mention "The Yellow Wallpaper," Woolf, and even Frankenstein, but their approach seems to work the best on Jane Eyre. They propose that Bertha Mason (the madwoman of their title) is not only a vehicle for Jane's unexpressed anger, but also that she is a double for Charlotte Bronte herself, who feels unexpressed anger at her reduced status as a "woman writer" in the nineteenth century.

I consider Jane Eyre to be some of the "best" fiction from the nineteeth century, despite the anger within.

I don't think you can write good literature without emotion as emotion equates to passion. How can one write well without some type of passion about the subject whether it is derived from anger or love or hate or even fear. What might be an issue if the level of emotion is so high that the writer loses perspective. If the writer loses perspective then it may create flaws in the writing or be too slanted or opinionated that it may disinterest or offend the intended audience.

I once read that the purpose of ALL writing is to have an effect on the reader.  How can an author do that without having passion and emotion for his work and in his work (or her work).