The Woman Warrior Summary
Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston Born in Stockton, California, in 1940, as a first-generation Chinese American, Maxine Hong Kingston grew up under the s... Read more

Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) is one of the first Asian American writers in the United States to achieve great acclaim for both her nonfiction and fiction. With her vivid portrayals of the magic of... Read more

One of the most outspoken contemporary feminist writers, Maxine Hong Kingston states in her autobiographical book The Woman Warrior (1976), "The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar.... What we hav... Read more

Critical Essay by Jane Kramer ["The Woman Warrior"] is a brilliant memoir. It shocks us out of our facile rhetoric, past the clichés of our obtuseness, back to the mystery of a st... Read more

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Fifer In autobiography, the told story often is accompanied by the untold one. In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the idea of autobiography is accompanied ... Read more

Critical Essay by John Leonard "China Men" contemplates exile; it seeks to explain exile by recovering history from deceit. It is quite as wonderful as "The Woman Warrior,"... Read more

Critical Essay by Anne Tyler China Men is not a sequel to The Woman Warrior but a companion piece, an amplification. It revolves, again, around the author's family, who operated a laundry in St... Read more

In the following essay, Johnston explores Kingston's use of myth in The Woman Warrior. In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston explores the relation between a mythic, three-dimensional reali... Read more

In the following essay, Melchior explores the issues of identity, the traditional Western concept of self, and the American tradition of autobiography raised by Kingston's rendering of her memo... Read more

Goldman has taught women's studies at the University of Victoria and Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. In the following essay, she assesses The Woman Warrior as a postmodern wor... Read more

In the following essay, Mitchell delineates Kingston's integration of oral storytelling into her written narrative in The Woman Warrior. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, b... Read more

In the following essay, Li surveys how Kingston establishes a uniquely Chinese-American female identity in The Woman Warrior. In a span of twelve years since the publication of her first book, The Wom... Read more

In the following essay, Schueller provides an analysis of The Woman Warrior as a work that offers insight into issues of racial, national, and gender identity. Ever since its publication in 1976, Maxi... Read more

Begum is an educator who has taught literature and feminist criticism at Bowling Green State University. In the following essay, she surveys the manner in which Kingston establishes her own identity a... Read more

A person's identity cannot be given to her, instead a person must achieve a sense of her character through personal experience and self-reflection. In "No Name Woman", Maxine Hong Kingston recalls t... Read more

In the chapter "White Tigers" from her book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston first fantasizes of a Chinese woman warrior before switching back to the reality of her American life as a woma... Read more

"I" is for Identity Maxine Hong Kingston, the author of "The Woman Warrior", has sorted out her struggles as a Chinese-American by devoting the pages of this novel to her conflicts and confusion. B... Read more