What describes family is not the people who are blood related or someone who has an obligation. Family is loving someone unconditionally and mutually; family is those who greet the worst self of someone without judgement and still stick around...

"The Poisonwood Bible," by Barbara Kingsolver, is a scathing critique of the destructive nature of pride and ambition, its narrative spanning over thirty years to reveal the tragic shortcomings of evangelist Nathan Price and the Western colonial...

Youth is malleable. A child’s surroundings, after all, shape the person that the child becomes. Leah Price, who witnesses the most dynamic shift in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, consistently challenges the established culture of...

Throughout The Poisonwood Bible, author Barbara Kingsolver uses Nathan Price as a representation of the dangers of the combination of religious fervor and power in the wrong hands. This is not meaning to state that religion on its own is bad...

In the historical fiction drama The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver illustrates major development in culture through the use of vivid flashbacks, graphic imagery, and specific framework structure, demonstrating that a culture shock was...

The use of one’s voice is one of the most powerful weapons humans possess. Yet, too often it is not used to its full potential, and rather, is overlooked, used to harm, or silenced altogether. Voices are shaped over many years and experiences, and...

Introduction

"The Poisonwood Bible," by Barbara Kingsolver, uses the character of Nathan Price to address the effects of western supremacy and one's personal superiority, specifically fueled by religion. The Price family travels to the Congo on a...

Adah Price has been surviving from the moment she was born. Surviving, not living. In The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver shows how Adah leads a very cynical existence, outcast to mostly everyone she knows (including her family), and hindered by a...

Barbara Kingsolver’s, The Poisonwood Bible is a multi-voice novel about how a family’s life is transformed during their missionary work in the Congo. Each character shows a unique perspective throughout the story, providing deeper insights on the...

Somewhere amongst the fallen pecans, the woolen afghan, and the clandestine photographs, we can find in Animal Dreams a consistent symbol of death. Codi is followed throughout the story by a seeming demise of those around her, from friends and...

In Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver reinvents the Western genre, riffing on a couple of common tropes and stock characters while simultaneously creating a female-centered story that rejects the violence and disconnected heroes of stereotypical...

In Mother Teresa’s poem “Do It Anyway,” the famous missionary reflects on the numerous misfortunes that occur in daily life and advises people coming face-to-face with these issues to continue acting benevolently. As she advises her readers: "Give...

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams epitomizes the themes of love and loss by means of its protagonist, Cosima (“Codi”) Noline, a young woman who returns to her small, rustic hometown of Grace, Arizona to take care of her demented father...

Although the past has chronologically been removed from present time, “the past is never dead and buried. In fact it’s not even past,” said William Faulkner. The theme of time is a common expression in American literature, as is seen in The...

“High Tide in Tucson” by Barbara Kingsolver attempts to enlighten its readers to the harsh reality that results from leaving home and demonstrate how our animal-like qualities keep us going. Kingsolver writes to the people who have already moved...

It is absolutely no coincidence whatsoever that Mother Earth is portrayed as a woman rather than a man. After all, a large part of the human existence has been spent taking advantage of Mother Earth’s resources. In the same way, many of history’s...

The post-modern pastoral was born out of ecofeminism, which is a combination of ecological and feminist theories. Gretchen Legler defines the post-modern pastoral in her essay, “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism.” She writes, “[The post-modern...