Insatiable Appetites

The women''s bestseller has become the acknowledged literary phenomenon of the last half-century. Madonne M. Miner takes the first critical look at this development and offers a serious reading of five of the most famous twentieth-century women''s bestsellers--Gone with the Wind Forever Amber Peyton Place Valley of the Dolls and Scruples. She outlines repeated plot structures image patterns and thematic concerns. From these Miner constructs a twentieth-century white middle-class American woman''s story suggests ways in which female readers respond to women''s bestsellers and proposes a matrilineal linkage between the novels.