Sophie’s Choice

A Contemporary Casebook

Edited By: James L. W. West III, Rhoda Sirlin

£29.99

This casebook collects interpretations of William Styron’s controversial novel, Sophie's Choice. It focuses on key themes like its treatment of women, sexuality, and the Holocaust, with commentaries by Elie Wiesel, Gloria Steinem, and Styron himself.

Sophie’s Choice: A Contemporary Casebook is a collection of interpretations and reactions to William Styron’s famous 1979 novel of the Holocaust. Sophie’s Choice won the…

Sophie’s Choice: A Contemporary Casebook is a collection of interpretations and reactions to William Styron’s famous 1979 novel of the Holocaust. Sophie’s Choice won the American Book Award and sold more than three million copies worldwide, but the novel has remained controversialfor its perceived treatment of women, its mixing of sexual comedy with high tragedy, and its legitimacy as an examination of the Holocaust. The items in the casebook are divided into three sections: Sexual Politics, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and Silence. Contributors include Pearl K. Bell, Gloria Steinem, Carolyn A. Durham, Barbara T.
Lupack, Richard L. Rubenstein, Cynthia Ozick, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Elie Wiesel. The collection is framed by a foreword and an afterword, both by Styron. This casebook will be useful to teachers, students, and scholars; it brings together important commentaries on Sophie’s Choice, focuses discussion on key themes and issues, and argues for the central place of the novel in late twentieth-century literature.

RHODA SIRLIN is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College. She is the author of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: Crime & Self-Punishment
(2002) and of articles on Styron’s Darkness Visible and A Tidewater Morning. She has also written an Instructor’s Manual for The Borzoi Book of Short Fiction (1983)

JAMES L. W. WEST III is Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of William Styron: A Life (1998) and The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King (2005). West is the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald.