Critical Insights: Barbara Kingsolver

This collection of essays offers readers an introduction to Kingsolver’s life, works, and critics. Four original essays provide valuable context for readers new to Kingsolver. These essays draw on Kingsolver’s biography to discuss the evolution of her political convictions and locate her as an inheritor of the political fiction of the 1930s; review the major pieces of Kingsolver criticism and the popular reception of her books; demonstrate how her first novel, The Bean Trees, affirms positive portrayals of racial and ethnic others; and offer an ecofeminist reading of Prodigal Summer that reveals how, throughout the novel, the female protagonists reconsider their relationships with human communities and the land of the Appalachian South.