Kingston, Maxine Hong 1940- American memoirist and novelistA memoirist, novelist, and essayist, Maxine Hong Kingston has had a remarkable influence on women's studies and literary studies since the late 1970s, in particular after the publication of her celebrated mixed-genre work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976).
Although born in California in 1940 and educated in American schools, Hong Kingston's upbringing was decidedly Chinese. She was a first-generation Chinese American woman, and this is implicitly related to the interweaving of her autobiographical narrative with fictional elements in The Woman Warrior. In order to magnify the contradictions she experienced in a white, sexist society in the West, she marries the realistic genre of life writing and a creative version of the memoir, adding invocations of Chinese myth and legend. In the real world of her parents, Chinese girls and women were not highly valued: in the real world of America, girls and women are treated as both elevated and subservient. | Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms | Credo Reference (Library Database)
