Product Description: Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities...read more

Product Description: Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the periodicals and communities in which they circulated...read more

Product Description: This book examines works from twelve authors from colonized cultures who write in English: William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Maxine Hong Kinston, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Alic Walker, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko...read more

Product Description: In this innovative study, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the results of urban living—traffic, garbage, sewage, waste, and pollution—arguing for a new recognition of all forms of human detritus as part of the natural world and thus for a broadening of our understanding of environmental literature...read more

Product Description: This book asserts that American literature is a postcolonial literature and that the values inherent in American literature reflect the mother culture, England. The author constructs an all-encompassing theory to support her assertion...read more

Product Description: The Fragmented Female Body and Identity explores the symbol of the wounded and scarred female body in selected postmodern, multiethnic American women’s novels, namely Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Emma Pérez’s Gulf Dreams, Paula Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School and Empire of the Senseless...read more

Product Description: An examination of identity using the trope of food and the theory of multicultural feminism to analyze the relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, and an individual and his or her local community as depicted in contemporary American fictional works.

Product Description: The dawn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the New Woman, a cultural and literary ideal that replaced Victorian expectations of domesticity with visions of social, political, and economic autonomy. Although such writers as Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin treated these ideals in well-known literature of that era, marginalized women also explored changing gender roles in works that deserve more attention today...read more

Product Description: By rethinking contemporary debates regarding the politics of aesthetic forms, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance explores how allegory can be used to resolve the "problem" of identity in both political theory and literary studies...read more

Product Description: "We stand to learn much about the durability of or changes in the American way of life from writers such as Bharati Mukherjee (born in India), Ursula Hegi (born in Germany), Jerzy Kosinski (born in Poland), Jamaica Kincaid (born in Antigua), Cristina Garcia (born in Cuba), Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Wendy Law-Yone (born in Burma), Mylène Dressler (born in the Netherlands), Lan Cao (born in Vietnam), and such Korean-born authors as Chang-rae Lee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Nora Okja Keller―writers who in recent years have come to this country and, in their work, contributed to its culture...read more

Product Description: Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction reflects the fact that ethnic detective novels have by now become an accepted subgenre of detective fiction. This volume focuses on the characteristics of ethnic detective fiction and the important genre modifications effected by the subgenre...read more

The Western Experience offers a thorough, analytical overview of Western civilization, giving students an introduction to the major achievements in Western thought, art, and science as well as the social, political, and economic context for understanding those developments. To demonstrate the connected nature of all histories, these various aspects of history are examined in an integrated way. To help readers develop their reasoning and writing skills, each chapter is constructed to serve as an example of a historical essay: A historical problem is presented and arguments are developed using historical evidence. The ninth edition features many improvements, including the work of Lisa Tiersten in her new chapter on Nineteenth Century Empires. .

(view table of contents)

Product Description: James Nagel offers the first systematic history and definition of the short story cycle genre as exemplified in contemporary American fiction, bringing attention to the format’s wide appeal among various ethnic groups. He examines in detail eight recent manifestations of the story cycle, all praised by critics while uniformly misidentified as novels: Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid; Monkeys, by Susan Minot; The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien; How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez; The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan; and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler...read more

Product Description: First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This text offers an account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive waves of immigrants to reach U.S. shores in the past 50 years. It focuses on Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Caribbeans and Asian Americans. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

There are numerous 20th century writers who are not technically native speakers of the language, and whose relation to it is ambivalent, problematic or even hostile: by a simple kinship analogy one may often speak of the "stepmother tongue." While fully aware of the current debates in post-colonial theory, John Skinner is also conscious of its sometimes unhelpful complexities and contradictions. The focus of this study is thus firmly on the fictional practice of the writers discussed. The Stepmother Tongue offers the reader both an insight into the diversity and rewards of contemporary anglophone fiction and analyses of some eighty individual texts. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the «politics of rememory» in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experience of African- and Asian-American women...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From the heart of the Great Depression to the turbulent 1960s, the mid-century in America was a vibrant literary era. Linda Wagner-Martin's comprehensive study encompasses the "political literature" that flourished in the 1930s, the beat movement of the 1950s, and the multicultural literature of the 1960s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Ethnic literature figures prominently in the current debate on multiculturalism, but even its supporters have had little to say about it as literature, stressing instead its political and sociological context. Thomas J. Ferraro, in this lively and accessible study of modern fiction by Americans of immigrant background, argues that the best of these stories demand—and reward—close reading and attention to questions of genre and literary form.Ferraro engages the literature of immigration and mobility by asking what motivates its authors and what their work actually accomplishes. He concentrates on five diverse examples of the "up-from-the-ghetto" narrative: Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Henry Miller's "The Tailor Shop," and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. To Ferraro the unsuspected value of these works is that they recast the conventions of ethnic representation, illustrating the power of ethnic writing to capture and redirect the national literary imagination.Ferraro's sharply observed reading of these five works shows how such reenactments of immigrant mobility test the ideology of assimilation against the writer's experience. Ethnic Passages will refocus discussion of how literature addresses the American conflict between ethnic heritage and the greater opportunities of "mainstream" society.