Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Casebook ed. by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (review)

tinuity," traces thematicand formal connectionswithin Angelous entire autobiographicaloeuvre .Thisenlighteningessay isparticularlyhelpful forcontextualizing images of motherhood in Caged Bird. Susan Gilbert's "Paths to Escape," reads CagedBirdthrough various literary traditions, especially the bildungsroman. The real gem ofthe collection, though, is Liliane K. Arensberg's "Death as Metaphor ofSelf." In it, she illustrates the tension between life and death with insight and scholarly adeptness. The collection closes with Claudia Tate's famous interview from BUck Women Writers at Work, thus ending the collection the same way it began — with Angelous voice. This collection is part of a new series from Oxford University Press called Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction. The series is edited byWilliam L. Andrews, and other tides so far include Toni Morrison's Beloved, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. Such a series is timely and necessary, and illustrates the growing importance ofethnic American literature in education and society at large. While Braxton's collection as a whole represents an important contribution toAfrican-American autobiographical criticism, the Casebook does have its weaknesses. Read together, the essays seem somewhat repetitive. Pivotal episodes (the rape scene, most notably) are repeated in almost every essay, which makes reading the collection in its entirety somewhat tiresome. Additionally, some of the essays push little further than plot summary. McPherson's essay, forinstance, and Gilbert's, while addressing important critical points, sometimes read as a synopsis ofthe plot rather than as a critical commentary of the autobiography. The strengths of the essays, however, outweigh the weaknesses, and make this a collection worth reading. Braxton's Casebook offers readers a valuable resource for studyingAngelou's text from a variety ofperspectives , and the series as a whole bodes well for the serious study ofcontemporary multicultural literature, ¿fc Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, ed. Maxine HongKingston's The Woman Warrior A Casebook. New York: Oxford, 1999. 208p. Wenxin Li Idaho State University As avolumeofOxford's Casebooks in ContemporaryFiction Series, MaxineHong Kingston's TheWoman Warrior:A Casebook collects key documents and criticism on one ofthe most widely read literary texts in America's colleges and universities today. Despite its broad and inclusive tide, this new series focuses primarily on fiction (and in some cases autobiography) by multicultural authors. So far, only 12« * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * SPRING 2000 the following have been featured besides Maxine Hong Kingston: Toni Morrison (Beloved), Maya Angelou (!Know Why the CagedBirdSings), and Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine). The basic structure of the casebooks falls into three parts: the work's historical context and critical reception, representative criticism, and an interview with the author. The series is general-edited by William L. Andrews. Compiling acasebookon anywidelystudied texts is necessarily a daunting task since the editor is subjected to, without exception, the distressing process ofexcluding many important studies from the few core documents and essays that will finally make into the collection. What to leave in and what to leave out often hinges not only on the quality ofthe criticism but also the need to balance the various critical approaches to the work. For Sau-ling Wong, the renowned Asian Americanist, the selection must have presented an even bigger challenge, because Kingston's The Woman Warriorhas not only generated an unusually large amount ofscholarship in the quarter century since its publication in 1976 but also a fierce controversy rarely seen in contemporary literary studies. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Casebook consists ofone interview , one fictional satire, five critical essays, and two book chapters, making it an excellent guide for instructors and students alikewhowish to have a quick tour of the critical landscape of this phenomenal work ofAsian American literature and still capture some ofthe highlights ofits vast scholarship. While three ofthe critics theorize on the gender and genre issues that The Woman Warrior raises, the casebookhas a prominent focus on the controversy that Kingston's book has generated among the Chinese American community. It is also worth noting that the scholarship contained in this casebookwas published predominantly in the 1980s, the most recent piece being Sau-ling Wong's own 1992 overview of the heated debates over the reception ofthe work. The history of The Woman Warriors reception is an interesting one...