Edith Wharton

1. Edith Wharton • The House of Mirth • Lily Bart longs to move up in society, but people think she’s sleeping around; she ends up killing herself. • The Age of Innocence • Newland Archer is bored with rigid New York society and almost has an affair with his wife’s cousin Madame Olenska.

2. Cultural Significance • Critiqued New York high society • Exposed limited options for upper-class women • Presented cultural double standards • Won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize

3. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin. It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

4. Comparisons sexual intrigue, infidelity, desire for something you shouldn’t have Achebe’s “Girls at War” Gordimer’s “Two Lovers” Adichie’sHalf of a Yellow Sun

5. Criticism on Half of a Yellow Sun ( possible sources for your final research paper )

6. Whittaker, David. "The Novelist as Teacher: Things Fall Apart and the Hauntology of ChimamandaNgoziAdichie'sHalf of a Yellow Sun.” Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, 1958-2008. Ed. David Whittaker. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 107-17. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.

7. Adichie deftly explores the complexity of modern Nigeria by describing, often through a series of cinematic flashbacks, the intricacies of the social, economic, and ethnic differences in the country. In one resonant section of the novel, we see Olanna, an Igbo, with her ex-boyfriend from the north, the Hausa Muslim Mohammed, and the lengths he goes to protect and support her, despite the putative differences between the two ethnic groups that have spiralled into bloody conflict. The scenes in which Olanna witnesses the slaughter of her Igbo relatives in the north by their former friends and neighbours, an example of what is now euphemistically termed 'ethnic cleansing', are particularly harrowing. She barely escapes the bloody interethnic violence, and is traumatized by the events she witnesses. Adichie is often at her best in the novel in the way she describes how the ethnic tensions in the country gradually and insidiously erode and poison relationships between friends, colleagues, and previously peacefully coexisting neighbours from different ethnic groups and religions.

8. Eromosele, Ehijele Femi. "Sex and Sexuality in the Works of ChimamandaNgoziAdichie." Journal of Pan African Studies 5.9 (2013): 99+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.

9. The sexual content in Half of a Yellow Sun is a deliberate attempt to underscore the humanity of the characters. In her essay, "African 'Authenticity' and the Biafran experience", Adichie confesses: "I was determined to make my novel about what I like to think of as the grittiness of being human--a book about relationships ... about people who have sex and eat food and laugh, about people who are fierce consumers of life" (50-51). It is worthy of note that the success and setbacks in the relationship between the main characters are predicated on sex. The conflict between Odenigbo and Olanna arises because Odenigbo sleeps with Amala; Olanna complicates it further by sleeping with Richard, who faces the consequence in Kanene's vengeful burning of his manuscript; Kainene's complicated relationship with Olanna, her twin, becomes even more so because of the betrayal. Sex thus becomes an ingredient for the theme of betrayal that permeates the entire novel.

10. Novak, Amy. "Who Speaks? Who Listens?: The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels." Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (2008): 31+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.

11. The novel does not concentrate on those at the center of the conflict--soldiers fighting in battle--but on the effect of traumatic events on the daily domestic lives of civilians. As the novel progresses, each of its three main characters undergoes, along with daily fear and hunger, a traumatic encounter: Olanna witnesses the murder of Igbos in the streets of Kano, including some of her family; Richard sees the murder of Igbos in the airport while waiting for a plane; and Ugwu is conscripted into the army where he observes and perpetrates the violence of wartime. As a result, each of these characters shows classic traumatic symptoms of disassociation and withdrawal, including the inability to locate the words to recount their experience.