Essays on Barbara Kingsolver

Introduction

The book, “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingsolver heavily emphasizes on ecological themes, the prodigal spirit of human nature and nature itself. Kingsolver’s fifth edition describes three stories of human love within a superior tapestry of lives between the farms and mountain of southern Appalachia. The novel clearly describes how human behavior is modeled in order to reflect usual animal behavior rather than reflecting the origin of man in the society. In the novel, Kingsolver clearly uses her own backdrop in evolutionary biology and ecology in order to inform natural the natural order of fictionalized Appalachia. The message in the ...

Offred and Leah are characters in The Handmaid’s Tale and The poisonwood Bible Respectively. They are both women who live in a patriarchal society and have to submit to the interests and needs of men rather than their own, Offred as a Handmaid and Leah as the daughter to a missionary. They struggle to survive this society, one by rebellion, the other by blending with the society. This paper seeks to provide a link between the Poisonwood Bible and the Handmaid’s Tale, as well as, the characters, similarities and differences in the books. The Handmaid tale was written by Margaret ...

When a novel contains themes of ethics or morality, there are two ways of reading it: It is either read for its ethical value or it is perceived as ethics. In The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver has used religion in her novel in such a way that it can indeed be regarded as ethics. As a novelist and political writer, Kingsolver has had her fair share of controversies. Kingsolver’s novel is a splendid model to understand how a work of fiction may serve as a valuable illustration of narrative as ethics. When reading Kingsolver’s novel, there comes a point where no longer matters whether ...

In the book The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, the voices of four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May explain their experiences in Africa after they moved there with their father, a missionary, and mother. The reader understands the lives of the four women mainly through their words. Each of the daughters can be identified by their way of using words and the emotions that are expressed with the words. The oldest daughter, Rachel, is the most American. She was moved from America to the Congo when she was teenager. Her manner and way of speaking show a colonial ...