Literary Identification from Charlotte Bront to Tsitsi Dangarembga by Laura Green seeks to account for the persistent popularity of the novel of formation from nineteenthcentury English through contemporary Anglophone literature. Through her reading of novels memoirs and essays by nineteenth twentieth and twentyfirstcentury women writers Green shows how this genre reproduces itself in the elaboration of bonds between and among readers characters and authors that she classifies collectively as literary identification. Particular literary identifications may be structured by historical and cultural change or difference but literary identification continues to undergird the novel of formation in new and evolving contexts. ampampnbsp The two nineteenthcentury English authors discussed in this book Charlotte Bront and George Eliot established the conventions of the novel of female formation. Their twentiethcentury English descendants Virginia Woolf Radclyffe Hall and Jeanette Winterson challenge the dominance of heterosexuality in such narratives.ampampnbspIn twentieth and twentyfirstcentury narratives by Simone de Beauvoir Jamaica Kincaid and Tsitsi Dangarembga the female subject is shaped not only by gender conventions but also by colonial and postcolonial conflict and national identity. ampampnbsp For many contemporary critics and theorists identification is a middlebrow or feminized reading response or a structure that functions to reproduce the middleclass subjectivity and obscure social conflict. However Green suggests that the range and variability of the literary identifications of authors readers and characters within these novels allows such identifications to function variably as well in liberatory or lifeenhancing ways as well as oppressive or reactionary ones.