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SOURCE: "Attempting to Connect: Verbal Humor in the Novels of Anne Tyler," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 57-75.
In the following essay, Bennett outlines the various types of verbal humor Tyler employs in her novels.
In the essay "Still Just Writing," Anne Tyler comments on her unusual characters: "People have always seemed funny and strange to me"; in a letter to me dated November 24, 1991, she clarified what she means in describing people that way: "I think of 'funny and strange' as wonderful traits, which always make me feel hopeful when I spot them." Some reviewers have faulted Tyler, however, for exaggerating her characters to bizarre or eccentric proportions. Marita Golden, for example, reviewing Breathing Lessons, writes that Maggie Moran "has a Lucy Ricardo quality that undermines our empathy." However, other critics, Robert Towers, Joseph Mathewson, Wallace Stegner, and Alice Hall Petry specifically, have compared her...
This section contains 6,262 words (approx. 21 pages at 300 words per page) |
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