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A Study Guide for Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres
A Study Guide for Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres
A Study Guide for Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres
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A Study Guide for Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres

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A Study Guide for Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 8, 2015
ISBN9781535817370
A Study Guide for Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres

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    A Study Guide for Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres - Gale

    Novels for Students, Volume 32

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    Printed in the United States of America

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    A Thousand Acres

    Jane Smiley

    1991

    Introduction

    Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres was published in New York in 1991 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. Primarily set in rural Iowa in 1979, the story revolves around a dysfunctional farm family headed by patriarch Larry Cook. With the realization that he is aging, Cook decides to incorporate his thousand-acre farm and divide it among his three daughters. When the youngest daughter expresses doubt about the wisdom of her father's plan, she is excluded from the contract. This sets in motion a series of life-altering events that leads to the physical and psychological breakdown of the Cook family.

    A Thousand Acres is a contemporary retelling of William Shakespeare's seventeenth-century drama King Lear. Both stories focus on the relationships between a father and his daughters and explore themes of gender roles, the dynamics of family relationships, and sibling rivalry. But whereas the daughters in King Lear behave badly out of their own sense of greed and selfishness, those in Smiley's novel are responding to their current situation after surviving a lifetime of emotional and sexual abuse

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