Mary Ellen Snodgrass - Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion

MCFARLAND LITERARY COMPANIONS

BY MARY ELLEN SNODGRASS

1. August Wilson (2004)

2. Barbara Kingsolver (2004)

3. Amy Tan (2004)

4. Walter Dean Myers (2006)

5.Kaye Gibbons (2007)

6.Jamaica Kincaid (2008)

8.Peter Carey (2010)

10.Leslie Marmon Silko (2011)

13.Isabel Allende (2012)

BY PHYLLIS T. DIRCKS

7.Edward Albee (2010)

BY ERIK HAGE

9.Cormac McCarthy (2010)

BY ROCKY WOOD

11.Stephen King (2011)

BY TOM HENTHORNE

12.William Gibson (2011)

MARY ELLEN SNODGRASS

McFarland Literary Companions, 13

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

ISBN 978-0-7864-7127-0

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

2013 Mary Ellen Snodgrass. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: Isabel Allende, 2010 (AP Photo/Peter Morgan); background image (Hemera/Thinkstock)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

For Miguel Gonzalez,
my friend and source

Anne Benham, reference librarian,
University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia

Commerce Public Library,
Commerce, Georgia

Joyner Library,
East Carolina University,
Greenville, North Carolina

McConnell Library,
Radford University,
Radford, Virginia

Martin Otts,
reference librarian,
Patrick Beaver Library,
Hickory, North Carolina

Hannah Owen,
childrens librarian,
Patrick Beaver Library,
Hickory, North Carolina

Mark Schumacher,
reference librarian,
Walter Jackson Library,
University of North Carolina,
Greensboro, North Carolina

Smith Library,
High Point University,
High Point, North Carolina

Walter R. Davis Library,
University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Special thanks go to Eileen Lawrence, vice president of Alexander Street Press for access to online databases and to reference librarians Beth Bradshaw and Martin Otts of the Patrick Beaver Library in Hickory, North Carolina.

Each person has his own truth, and ... all are valid.
Forest of the Pygmies

For a wide readership of Isabel Allendes vivid canon of young adult, feminist, Latina, and American literature, Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion outlines the themes and styles that govern her works. Essays inform the reader, feminist, historian, linguist, student, researcher, teacher, reviewer, and librarian of respected commentaries on characters, plots, humor, symbols, wisdom, and pervasive gender concepts in Allendes range of texts. Opening with a chronology of Allendes life and Chilean heritage, the companion introduces her early works, self-exile to Venezuela, and award-winning titles. A family lineage of the Allende-Gordon families claries kinship of people who ll her memoirs and interviews.

The 84 A-to-Z entries summarize twenty-rst century commentary from scholars, literary historians, biographers, and reviewers with generous citations from primary and secondary sources and comparisons to classic and popular literature. Entries feature references to the works from which each event derives. Analysis from Australia, Canada, Chile, England, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, Tasmania, Tobago, and Trinidad and from American and Hispanic consortia illustrates the range of scholarly and popular response to Allendes titles. Each entry concludes with selected source material on such subjects as adaptation, music, order, reading, food, feminism, male persona, writing, and achievement. Annotated charts substantiate dates and events and identify interrelated casts of characters, notably, both ctional and historical characters in the House of the Spirits trilogy and Ins of My Soul. Generous cross references point to divergent strands of thought and direct the user toward related ideas, from violence to war and from adaptation to wisdom.

Back matter aids the student, reviewer, and researcher in locating and elucidating details. A glossary of 212 terms enlightens readers to the signicance of the mestizo, picaro, scapular, zhong-yi, loa, qi, and Alta California. Appendix A: Historical Timeline from the Allende Canon orders background data on the Inquisition, student activism at Berkeley, singsong girls, 9/11, Diego de Almagros exploration of Chile, and the original version of the Zorro myth. A second appendix provides 43 topics for group or individual projects, composition, analysis, background material, and comparative literature, notably, themes of social issues and conict, the impact of settings, contrasts of mothering instincts, shifts in family power, evidence of the supernatural, focal terms, and gendered rules for behavior or career advancement as revealed in works by Paolo Coelho, Hannah Pakula, Douglass G. Brinkley, Rita Dove, Jessamyn West, Bernard Malamud, and Eve Ensler.

Back matter concludes with an exhaustive alphabetic listing of primary sources followed by a general, biographical, and interview bibliography and a literary booklist organized by each of the 18 Allende titles that the sources discuss. Many entries derive from journal and periodical articles, interviews, and critiques of Allendes public appearances, memoirs, novels, and short ction in major newspapers from the Americas, Great Britain, and the Pacic. Secondary sources, particularly those by experienced reviewers, justify the inclusion of Allendes publications in feminist, Latina, and postcolonial literature and on high school and college reading lists. A comprehensive index directs users of the literary companion to major and minor characters and peoples, divinities, events and historic eras, signicant gures, place names, published titles, literary motifs, period terms, genres, and issues, e.g., Maurice Mbembel and Yanacona, Erzulie and loas, earthquake and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Napoleon and Jean Latte, cordillera and San Francisco, Tosca and The Proper Respect, autodidacticism and pseudonym, Bal de Cordon Bleu and concentration camp, beast fable and magical realism, racism and war.

A feminist powerhouse, Latina author Isabel Allende contributes to the world canon a rich variety of stories, historical ction, and autobiographical reection. A native of Lima, Peru, she invigorates her works with a South American perspective tinged with the worldly wisdom of a global traveler. Her characters dramatize the myriad stories of the conquest and miscegenation of peoples of the Western Hemisphere, from the war of Francisco Pizarro against the Inca in Ins of My Soul to the mongrelized settlement of San Francisco by foreigners and Americanos in Daughter of Fortune, from the emancipation of Haitian slaves by Toussaint LOuverture at Le Cap in