Sandra Cisneros's the House on Mango Street

In her instantaneously acclaimed work, Sandra Cisneros draws on her own experience as a Mexican-American woman writer facing obstacles in a patriarchal community resistant to change. Compared to the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The House on Mango Street is made up of lyrical passages, interconnected vignettes, and meditations and observations that resemble prose poems. Cisneros's structurally and thematically bold work explores the often-violent coming of age of a young Mexican-American woman. This new title in the Modern Critical Interpretations series analyzes the work through full-length critical essays, and features a bibliography, notes on the contributing writers, a chronology of the author's life, an index, and an introductory essay by esteemed critic Harold Bloom.