Text Analysis.doc

in 1976 , an unknown woman writer Maxine Hong Kingston published her first book: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. The book immediately aroused great interest among literature circle. Articles which read it from different perspectives were numerous in the past thirty years, After the publication of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, Kingston continually published China Men (1980), winning the American Book Award and a runner-up for Pulitzer Prize, and a novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book(1989), winning P.E.N. USA West Award in fiction. Besides all these awards prizes, she was also awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Clint in 1997.This book contains five chapters with each consisting of a story about a woman. The first story, titled as “No Name Woman”, deals with the narrators paternal aunts story which her mother used as a less to instruct her. The second story “ White Tigers” is about an imaginary woman warrior derived from the Fa MuLan Ballad which her mother chanted to her in her childhood. This woman warrior is the imaginary “I”. the third story illustrates the struggle and hard work of the narrators mother both in china and America. In both countries, her mother has to fight against “ghost” to live as a human being. The fourth story is entitled “At the Western Palace” which, in Chinese mythology, means a place full of immorality. Here it refers to the United States in the eyes of the mother Brave Orchid, and the maternal aunt Moon Orchid. It is a sad story of abandonment. The last story is “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”, into which the narrator stuffs all her confusion, anger and frustration of her growth as a Chines American girl. It describes the Chinese girls silence at home, in the school and in the society at large, and her struggle against this silence. This chapter ends with a story of Ts ai Yen and her “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.”Literature ReviewSince The Woman Warrior was shown on the market, it has aroused great interest among literature circle. Articles which read it from different perspectives were numerous in the past thirty years. Different reponese about its genre, a friction or nonfiction, about its writing purpose, orientalism or nationalism, about its contents, a feminst text or a cultural one,made really a hot debate.E.D. Huntley analyses The Woman Warrior from the perspective of writing styleFeminist criticisms certainly occupy a large portion in the reviews of this book. King-Kok Cheung, in her Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston; Joy Kogawa, aims to research the provocative silence in both The Woman Warrior and China Men, pointing out that in both books, “the narrator ultimately fractures Chinese and white American orthodoxies to make room for renewed gender and ehnic identities and for My paper