" Rituals of Survival": A Critical Reassessment of the Fiction of Nicholasa Mohr

BR Rico - Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2007 - JSTOR
BR Rico
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2007JSTOR
Back in 1972, 1 was asked to write a novel based on short series of vignett had completed. It
was then that I decided that if I as a woman and my ethn community did not exist in North
American letters, then we would now. Nicholasa Mohr," The Journey toward a Common
Ground" 1 The first Puerto Rican woman writer to have her fiction published by am
publishing house in the United States and the author of a dozen books adults and young
people, Nicholasa Mohr has been called" the most prod tive and recognized Nuyorican …
Back in 1972, 1 was asked to write a novel based on short series of vignett had completed. It was then that I decided that if I as a woman and my ethn community did not exist in North American letters, then we would now. Nicholasa Mohr," The Journey toward a Common Ground" 1
The first Puerto Rican woman writer to have her fiction published by am publishing house in the United States and the author of a dozen books adults and young people, Nicholasa Mohr has been called" the most prod tive and recognized Nuyorican novelist" writing in the United States. 2 fiction, which has received numerous awards (including the New York Tim Outstanding Book of the Year, the National Book Award, and the Amer Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation), has been praised fo" its delicate insight combined with... deliberate detail" and for what it h avoided: trendiness, stereotypical representations, and trite endings. 3 In sp of Mohr's substantial literary production during the last thirty years, there currently no critical biography or volume of criticism devoted solely to h work. Until just recently, not even the date of her birth (1938) has been c rectly reported in many of the popular reference guides. 4 Although in rec years there has been some scholarly analysis of Mohr's fiction in terms of categories of" novels of development," bildungsromany ethnobiography, or fiction of immigrants, most of the critical appraisals and published reviews her work during the last twenty years have classified it almost exclusively" children's literature"-a label that the author herself has rejected. 5 The critical neglect of Mohr's work is part of a larger problem: although Puerto Rican writers living on the US mainland have published a substant body of literature in the last century, this output has been greeted by a nea total critical silence-or what one reviewer has called a" paucity of criticism
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