Product Description: The first thematic series published for American literature, THE WADSWORTH THEMES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE SERIES is currently comprised of 21 themes spanning the time period normally covered in the two-semester American literature survey course--1492 to the present...read more

Product Description: The first thematic series published for American literature, THE WADSWORTH THEMES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE SERIES is currently comprised of 21 themes spanning the time period normally covered in the two-semester American literature survey course--1492 to the present...read more

Starting with Salman Rushdie's assertion that even though something is always lost in translation, something can always be gained, Martha Cutter examines the trope of translation in twenty English-language novels and autobiographies by contemporary ethnic American writers. She argues that these works advocate a politics of language diversity--a literary and social agenda that validates the multiplicity of ethnic cultures and tongues in the United States.Cutter studies works by Asian American, Native American, African American, and Mexican American authors. She argues that translation between cultures, languages, and dialects creates a new language that, in its diversity, constitutes the true heritage of the United States. Through the metaphor of translation, Cutter demonstrates, writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, and Richard Rodriguez establish a place within American society for the many languages spoken by multiethnic and multicultural individuals. Cutter concludes with an analysis of contemporary debates over language policy, such as English-only legislation, the recognition of Ebonics, and the growing acceptance of bilingualism. The focus on translation by so many multiethnic writers, she contends, offers hope in our postmodern culture for a new condition in which creatively fused languages renovate the communications of the dominant society and create new kinds of identity for multicultural individuals.

"Women should be seen and not heard." That was a well-known maxim in nineteenth century America. American women writers--such as Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather--devised a brilliant method for crashing that barrier to creativity. In her new book, UNRULY TONGUE: IDENTITY AND VOICE IN AMERICAN WOMEN'S WRITING, 1850-1930 (University Press of Mississippi, $40, cloth) Martha Cutter says the ten African American and Anglo American women she studied wrote as inside agitators. Over time they created a new theory of language. Cutter says, "From 1780 to 1860 American writers were preoccupied with the feminine virtues of purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity--a constellation of attributes known as the domestic saint, or True Woman." But that soon changed. As more women were educated and more women began to work outside the home, women writers found a need to express themselves with a growing sense of independence. In the first years covered by her book, Cutter found writers Fanny Fern, Harriet Wilson, and Louisa May Alcott employing female characters who stayed within their domestic roles and stuck to a very submissive script. "The years from 1850 to 1930 reflected a great deal of cultural change," Cutter says, "as the New Woman gradually displaced the True Woman, and the domestic voice was replaced by one that was more concerned with the theoretical basis of women's silencing." In this atmosphere, Cutter finds writers Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances Harper, and Kate Chopin writing about women who bring unruly tongues and independent thinking to traditional female roles. These writers enabled those that followed, such as Willa Cather and Jessie Fauset, to create characters with masculine and racist voices and undermine those characters from the inside. Throughout her book, Cutter discovers how these ten writers, even those who wrote in what appears to be a purely feminine and domestic voice, found ways to rethink language and create new identities and new voices that were both feminine and unruly. (view table of contents)