JOAN DIDION
Joan Didion at the Brooklyn Book Festival 2008 taken by David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1934-
Nationality: American
Literary Periods:
American Confessional Period, 1960-
Postwar Period, 1945-1999
Twentieth Century, 1900-1999
Twenty-First Century, 2000-
Literary Movements:
New Journalism
Postmodernism 1963-
BIOGRAPHY
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Biography and critical essay on the life and works of Joan Didion
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RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Books, essays, and journal articles indexed in MLA International Bibliography 
[Database]
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative Didion scholarship published in books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers and the Colby College Libraries catalog. If you discover books or articles through MLA that are not available at Colby or through our lending partners, please request these items using your ILLiad Account.
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Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel (2008) by Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9781587296291See Chapter "Joan Didion: Gender and Lacanian Tragedy"
Joan Didion : essays & conversations (1984) by Call Number: Miller PS3554.I33 Z72 1984ISBN: 0865380368
Strategies of Reticence (1990) by
This work examines the unspoken in the work of four women writers - Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion - as a consciously employed feminist rhetoric. Acknowledging that reticence is often enforced by patriarchal silencing of women. Stout argues that each of these writers turns that traditional limitation into a weapon of mockery of assault against masculine society.
Call Number: Miller PS374.S54 S76 1990ISBN: 0813912628
The Critical Response to Joan Didion (1993) by
Joan Didion is a major contemporary American novelist and journalist whose works have popular appeal and are widely studied from a variety of literary perspectives as well as for philosophical, psychological, and political insights into the times and topics with which they deal. This volume collects an extensive range of critical commentary, both reviews and scholarly examinations, including newly commissioned essays, covering the entire canon: four works of fiction and five of nonfiction published between 1963 and 1992. Individually, the selections explore diverse critical approaches to Didion's canon; collectively, they establish a critical map that will serve as a guide to future scholarship. A substantive introduction assesses the canon and the critical reaction to it. Other features include a brief chronology of Didion's accomplishments, a bibliography, and contributors and subject indexes.
Call Number: Bates PS3554.I33 Z6 1994ISBN: 0313285349
Through the window, out the door : women's narratives of departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion (1998) by Call Number: Colby PS374.W6 S78 1998ISBN: 9780817309084See Chapter "Moving Into the Political: Joan Didion and the Imagination of Engagement"
Stories of old : the imagined West and the crisis of historical symbology in the 1970s (1999) by Call Number: Bates PS374.W4 B58 1999ISBN: 9155444369See Chapter "Narrating Place: Geography and Anxiety in Joan Didion's The White Album"
The Uses of Darkness (2000) by Call Number: Miller BT83.55 .G34 2000ISBN: 0268043051See Chapter "The Child and the Mother: Joan Didion, Mary Gordon, Virginia Woolf"
Mapping the Private Geography (2001) by Call Number: Bates & Bowdoin PS366.A88 R4 2001ISBN: 0786408774See Chapter "Joan Didion's 'Places of the Mind'"
Alfred Kazin's America (2003) by Call Number: Miller PS29.K38 A25 2003ISBN: 0066213436See Chapter "Two Cassandras: Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates"
Paradigms of Paranoia (2005) by Call Number: Miller PS374.C594 C63 2005ISBN: 0817314474See Chapter "Joan Didion: The Fatal Glamor of Conspiracy"
PRIMARY SOURCES
The Paris Review Interviews [Interview] by
A Picador Paperback Original "The Paris Review is one of the few truly essential literary magazines of the twentieth century--and now of the twenty-first. Frequently weird, always wonderful."--Margaret Atwood How do great writers do it? From James M. Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm"--The Paris Review has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. For more than half a century, the magazine has spoken with most of our leading novelists, poets, and playwrights, and the interviews themselves have come to be recognized as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life. They have won the coveted George Polk Award and have been a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Paris Review former editor Philip Gourevitch introduces an entirely original selection of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews. Often startling, always engaging, these encounters contain an immense scope of intelligence, personality, experience, and wit from the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West, and Billy Wilder. This is an indispensable book for all writers and readers.
Call Number: Bates PS225 .P26 2006 v.1 - v.4ISBN: 9780312361754
