About FDU Press

These critical essays are divided into three sections: “Modernist Contexts,” “Feminist Issues,” and “Classroom Encounters.” The book comprises an introduction by Pettit (author of A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker’s Poetry and Fiction, 2000); 20 essays (five previously unpublished, two student essays), equally divided among the sections; and a fourth part devoted to Parker’s letters to Alexander Woolcott (written between 1926 and 1943) and a 1956 interview of Parker that originally appeared in The Paris Review. Demonstrating a recent shift in Parker criticism away from her feminism and toward her modernist tendencies, the new essays include a discussion of Parker’s modernism by Arthur Kinney—who wrote Dorothy Parker (CH, Sep’79) and Dorothy Parker, Revised (1998) and contributed the introduction to The Coast of Illyria, a posthumously published play by Parker and Ross Evans (1990)—and discussions of classroom encounters by Ann Fox and Sophia Mihic and students Timothy McMackin and Donna Stamm. Although not the subject of a section, Parker’s famous wit permeates the book. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.

S. M. Nuernberg, University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh
Choice, April 2006