MARY JANE HURST is a Professor of English at Texas Tech University, USA, and the author of The Voice of the Child in American Literature: Linguistic Approaches to Fictional Child Language.

Finding One's Place by Finding One's Voice in Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying and Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy Language and Gender in the Academic Communities of Ann Beattie's Another You and John Updike's Memories of the Ford Administration Balancing Self and Other through Speech and Silence in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses Love, Destruction, and Wounded Hearts in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris Contours of the Future in Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel and Rudolfo Anaya's Alburquerque Twenty-First Century Reflections on American Voices and American Identities

Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction. Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities.