In the following essay, Wong analyzes the anthropological aspects of Tan's novels The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife and their place in literary tradition.

In the following comparative essay on Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Ghymn discusses the fable-like quality of The Joy Luck Club and studies how cultural expectations affect the mother-daughter relationships portrayed in the novel.

In the following essay, Hamilton demonstrates how Tan uses the concepts of feng shui, astrology, and the Five Elements to enhance the characters in The Joy Luck Club.

In the following essay, Souris applies Wolfgang Iser's theory concerning multiple-narrator novels to Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

In the following essay, Heung addresses how The Joy Luck Club portrays mothers and daughters struggling to maintain female-centered relationships—through language and storytelling—in the face of cultural and social pressures.

In the following essay, Booth Foster discusses the importance of daughters listening to their mothers' voices in order to discover their own voices in Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

In the following essay, Ho argues that Tan accurately and realistically portrays the complicated lives of immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters and that these fictional portrayals are instructive, especially when placed in the context of the oppression of women in China.

In the following comparative essay on Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey and Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Schueller writes that Kingston uses a subversive male protagonist to illustrate how ethnicity is socially constructed, while Tan uses four separate mother-daughter relationships to simultaneously embrace and thwart conceptions of ethnicity and gender.

In the following essay, Xu argues that the way that Tan constructed the story of The Joy Luck Club is similar to how an individual pieces together his or her past through memory.

In the following essay, Shen discusses the importance of storytelling to the mother-daughter bond in Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

In the following essay, Shear analyzes the mother-daughter relationship in Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

In the following essay, Li discusses the emphasis in Tan's works, including The Joy Luck Club, on female familial relationships.

In the following essay, Delucchi seeks to demonstrate how literature's “fictionalized life histories” contribute to social science by reading The Joy Luck Club as an account of aging and identity formation.

In the following excerpt, Braendlin analyzes how the women's liberation movement has affected mother-daughter relationships, specifically focusing on the mother-daughter dialogics in Tan's The Joy Luck Club.

In the following review, Yglesias delineates the reasons that Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife may surpass the success of her The Joy Luck Club.

In the following review, Cheng praises Tan's The Joy Luck Club for its accessibility and vision.

In the following review, Rubin asserts, "In Tan's hands, these linked stories [of The Joy Luck Club—diverse as they are—fit almost magically into a powerfully coherent novel."]