In this book Sarah Gamble explores Angela Carter's celebration of the marginal, the balance in her work between history and fantasy, fairy tale and reality, excessive desire and love and looks at how these tensions influenced both the form and content of her fiction. Providing close, perceptive readings of all of Carter's fiction, many of the short stories, as well as the non-fiction writing, Sarah Gamble demonstrates how, throughout her career, Carter wrote with the intention of subverting con...
Daughters of a British father and a Chinese mother, Edith and Winnifred Eaton pursued wildly different paths. While Edith wrote stories of downtrodden Chinese immigrants under the pen name Sui Sin Far, Winnifred presented herself as Japanese American and published Japanese romance novels in English under the name Onoto Watanna. In this invigorating reappraisal of the vision and accomplishments of the Eaton sisters, Dominika Ferens departs boldly from the dichotomy that has informed most commenta...
Scrutinized! (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Stud, #42)
by Professor Monica Chiu
Diverse Futures (New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality)
by Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Writing to American poet Malcolm Cowley in 1949, William Faulkner expressed his wish to be known only through his books. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature several months later, and when he died famous in 1962, his biographers immediately began to unveil and dissect the unhappy life of "the little man from Mississippi." Despite the many works published about Faulkner, his life and career, it still remains a mystery how a poet of minor symbolist poems rooted in the history of th...
A unique collection of essays explores the diversity of Asian American literature from the 19th century to the present
Korean and Korean American Life Writing in Hawai'i
by Heui-Yung Park
Korean and Korean American Life Writing in Hawai'i examines such self-representing genres as lyric poems, oral history, autobiography, and memoirs written by Korean and Korean Americans from the early twentieth century to the present, in order to explore how these people have shaped their individual or collective identities. Their representations, produced in different periods by successive generations, reveal how Koreans in their diaspora to Hawai`i came to terms with their ethnic and local sel...
California Dreaming (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies)
California Dreaming is a multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of "Asian America" through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California's imaginary. Here, "California" is interpreted as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking the state's cultural imaginary, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the...
A recent explosion of publishing activity by a wide range of talented writers has placed Asian American literature in the limelight. As the field of Asian American literary studies gains increasing recognition, however, questions of misreading and appropriation inevitably arise. How is the growing body of Asian American works to be read? What holds them together to constitute a tradition? What distinguishes this tradition from the "mainstream" canon and other "minority" literatures? In the first...
Cold War Friendships
by Associate Professor of English Josephine Nock Park
Since the 1970's, when Maxine Hong Kingston began publishing her prize-winning books, we have seen an explosive growth in Asian American literature, a literature that has won both popular and critical acclaim. Literary anthologies and critical studies attest to a growing academic interest in the field. This book seeks to identify the forces behind this literary emergence and to explore both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americannes...
Transforming Chinese American Literature (Modern American Literature, #20)
by Joan Chiung-Huei Chang
The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the social and historical landscape of America and India acted as a reflective surface. Manan Desai considers how their interactions provided a “transnational refraction”—a p...
Understanding Chang-rae Lee (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)
by Amanda M. Page
In Understanding Chang-rae Lee, Amanda M. Page provides the first critical survey of the work of one of America's most acclaimed contemporary novelists. Chang-rae Lee, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford University, has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, an American Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lee is the author of five novels, including The Surrendered, which was a named a Pulitzer Prize finalist...
Foreign Accents sets forth a historical poetics of verse by writers of Chinese descent in the U.S. from the early twentieth century to the present. With readings of works by Ezra Pound, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Ha Jin, and John Yau, this study charts the dimensions of Asian American verse as an evolving and contested counterpoetic formation.
A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature
An informative and original collection of twenty-five essays, the Resource Guide to Asian American Literature offers background materials for the study of this expanding discipline and suggests strategies and ideas for teaching well-known Asian American works.Each essay contains information about the work (e.g., its publication or production history), its popular and critical reception, a biographical sketch of the author, the historical context, major themes, critical issues, pedagogical topics...
Tell This Silence
by Patti Duncan (Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, Portland State University, USA)
Tell This Silence" by Patti Duncan explores multiple meanings of speech and silence in Asian American women's writings in order to explore relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Duncan argues that contemporary definitions of U.S. feminism must be expanded to recognize the ways in which Asian American women have resisted and continue to challenge the various forms of oppression in their lives. There has not yet been adequate discussion of the multiple meanings of sile...
Perhaps the most popular of all canonical American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that satirize American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have explored Twain’s work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and Asian Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan Hsu examines Twain’s career-long archive of writings about United States relations with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain’s early writings about Chinese im...
Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire (Asian American History & Cultu)
by Cynthia Wu
Cynthia Wu's provocative Sticky Rice examines representations of same-sex desires and intraracial intimacies in some of the most widely read pieces of Asian American literature. Analyzing canonical works such as John Okada's No-No Boy, Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, as well as Philip Kan Gotanda's play, Yankee Dawg You Die, Wu considers how male relationships in these texts blur the boundaries among the homosocial, th...