Post- world War II, Victorian Female, and Romantic Period Female Literature Comparison of Language

Sandra Cisneros (1954–)

Revered Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros’s first novel, The House on Mango Street, a classic tale of a young girl coming of age in Chicago, won the National Book Award in 1985. It has become a definitive bildungsroman, taught in classrooms across the country as an essential view into an American upbringing. Cisneros’s fiction rings with realism, engaging with plotlines containing domestic violence, sexual harassment, racism, poverty, and characters young women can relate to. 
Noted for her bilingualism in her writing, Cisneros is also a poet and essayist. One of the United States’s and Mexico’s most important writers, Cisneros has received the National Medal of Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN Center USA Literary Award, the Fairfax Prize, the National Medal of the Arts, and the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship.

Toni Morrison (1931–2019)

Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, was a preeminent literary figure chronicling the Black experience and Black identity in America—whose death in 2019 felt to many like the end of an era. Imaginative and immensely powerful in her writing, Toni Morrison is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, which was based on the life of Margaret Garner, a Black woman who escaped slavery but was enslaved again under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. 
Also known for Song of Solomon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and for her debut novel The Bluest Eye, Morrison was a prolific writer who also produced plays, poetry, children’s books, short stories, and even a libretto for an opera about Margaret Garner.

Amy Tan (1952–)

Oakland native Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club had a monumental effect on Asian American literature and culture, both as a publishing success and as a rich representation of the interlinked lives of four Chinese American families living in San Francisco. Tan, who has openly spoken about mental illness, depicts this within the complexities of Asian American mother-daughter relationships, from the vantage point of both mothers and daughters. The novel acknowledged both sides of an immigrant culture conundrum, with tension between an obedience to family and culture and a desire for individualism and freedom. Tan also went on to co-write the screenplay for the novel’s film adaptation directed by Wayne Wang.
Tan has published many books, including The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Hundred Secret Senses, two children’s books, and a memoir titled Where The Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir.