Anne Tyler, Vinegar Girl

Cecilia Donohue (Independent Scholar - North America)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication Jun 2016

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Anne Tyler’s 21st novel,

Vinegar Girl

, offers readers a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s comedy

The Taming of the Shrew.

Published as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series of “novelistic adaptations of various Bard plays” (Fischer),

Vinegar Girl

is not Tyler’s first brush with Shakespeare for a plot point; 1995’s

Ladder of Years

featured three daughters of a widower, the youngest and closest to him named Cordelia

But while the parallels between

Lear

and

Ladder

began and ended there,

Vinegar Girl

appropriates the essential plot and characters of the original

Shrew

whileincorporating cultural values, social issues, and gender politics of the 21st century.

Vinegar Girl

also marks a shift in plot content for Tyler. While her most recent novels have been dealing with the…

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1246 words

Citation: Donohue, Cecilia. "Vinegar Girl". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 September 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35822, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Anne Tyler, Vinegar Girl

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