Women Authors - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism

Understanding Diane Johnson

Name: Understanding Diane Johnson
Author: Carolyn A. Durham
ISBN: 9781611170757

by Carolyn A. Durham

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Overview

Understanding Diane Johnson is a biographical and critical study of a quintessential American novelist who has devoted forty-five years to writing about French and American culture. Johnson, who was nominated for the National Book Award three times and the Pulitzer Prize twice, has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books since the 1970s and is the author of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction volumes.
Johnson is well known as a comic novelist who addresses serious social problems. Durham outlines Johnson's continued exploration of women's lives and her experimentation with varied forms of narrative technique and genre parody in the detective novels The Shadow Knows and Lying Low, both award-winning novels. Durham examines Johnson's reinvention of the international novel of manners--inherited from Henry James and Edith Wharton--in her best-selling Franco-American trilogy: Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L'Affaire.
As the first book-length study of this distinguished American writer, Understanding Diane Johnson surveys an extensive body of work and draws critical attention to a well-published, widely read author who was the winner of the California Book Awards Gold Medal for Fiction in 1997.

About the Author, Carolyn A. Durham

Carolyn A. Durham is the Inez Kinney Gaylord Professor of French and chair of the Department of French at the College of Wooster, where she also teaches in the programs of comparative literature, film studies, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. She is the author of L'Art romanesque de Raymond Roussel; The Contexture of Feminism: Marie Cardinal and Multicultural Literacy; Double Takes: Culture and Gender in French Films and Their American Remakes; Literary Globalism: Anglo-American Fiction Set in France; and many articles on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and American fiction and film.