The Fiction of Anne Tyler

The essays in this volume, most of them selected from papers presented in 1989 at the Anne Tyler Symposium sponsored by Essex Community College in Baltimore, place Tyler in a direct line from the masters of modernism, including Faulkner and Welty. The book begins with Doris Bett's analysis of Breathing Lessons, in which she examines the dynamic of opposing tensions as a key structural principle in her novels. The contributors look at the conflicting roles of kinship in her novels from a sociological perspective; the central issues of individual novels; the mentor role of Tyler's unconventional mothers-in-law; the function of residence in her fictional method and theme; and the link between her artist figures to her own view of the artistic process. Other topics are Tyler's affinity with Bellow, Drabble, and Updike; parallels between Tyler and Southern literary antecedents; and her relation to public issues. ISBN 0-87805-435-9: $27.50.