Criticism

Butler, Robert J. "The Woman Writer as American Picaro: Open Journeying in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying." The Centennial Review XXXI, No. 3 (Summer 1987): 308-29.

Discusses Fear of Flying as a picaresque novel, asserting that "Fear of Flying, like most American journey books,… boldly equates life with motion and stasis with death."

Ferguson, Mary Anne. "The Female Novel of Development and the Myth of Psyche." In The Voyage In Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, pp. 228-43. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983.

Discusses how Fear of Flying and other novels "show women successfully developing, learning, growing in the world at large."

Friedman, Edward H. "The Precocious Narrator: Fanny and Discursive Counterpoint," in his The Antiheroine's Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque, pp. 203-19. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1987.

Examines Fanny according to the tradition of the picaresque novel.

Guy, David. "The Devil's Inamorata." New England Review 15, No. 4 (Fall 1993): 184-91.

Provides a positive assessment of Jong's discussion of Henry Miller in The Devil at Large.

Harder, Kelsie B. "The Masculine Imperative: Naming By Gael Greene and Erica Jong." Literary Onomastics Studies XI (1984): 147-63.

Illustrates the significance of character names in Jong's works.

Johnson, Diane. "Should Novels Have a Message?: Joan Didion, Bertha Harris, and Erica Jong." In her Terrorists and Novelists, pp. 124-33. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1975.

Discussion of the question of messages in novels, using How to Save Your Own Life as an example of a novel that "resembles in every way the ramblings of the deserted friend who has taken to the tape recorder and submitted the unedited transcript…."

Kemp, Peter. "Moll Flounders." The Listener 104, No. 2685 (30 October 1980): 588-89.

Negative assessment of Fanny.

Review of At the Edge of the Body, by Erica Jong. Kirkus Reviews XLVII, No. 3 (1 February 1979): 189.

Assesses the poems in At the Edge of the Body as "glib, the work of an imitative, if intelligent, sensibility," and asserts that Jong "exerts her personal charm to make us accept second-rate work."

Review of Serenissima: A Novel of Venice, by Erica Jong. Kirkus Reviews LV, No. 4 (15 February 1987): 245-46.

Responds negatively to Serenissima.

Kronsky, Betty. "Eat, Darling, Eat!" The Village Voice XVI, No. 35 (2 September 1971): 23.

Positive assessment of Fruits and Vegetables.

Review of Ordinary Miracles, by Erica Jong. Publisher's Weekly 224, No. 7 (12 August 1983): 62.

Mixed assessment of Ordinary Miracles.