Form And Transformation In Asian American Literature

This critical anthology draws on current theoretical movements to examine the breadth of Asian American literature from the earliest to the most recent writers. Covering fiction, essays, poetry, short stories, ethnography, and autobiography, Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature advances the development of a theoretically informed, historically and culturally specific methodology for studying this increasingly complex field. The essays in this anthology probe into hotly debated issues as well as understudied topics, including the relations between Asian American and other minority American writings.

In Narrating Nationalisms, Jinqi Ling brings fresh perspectives to ongoing debates over the nature of Asian American literary production from the 1950s through 1980. He offers provocative interpretations of five formative texts demonstrating how these works contribute to the ongoing dialogue around progressive multicultural projects. Ling's nuanced analysis richly complicates our understanding of these Asian American classics and provides a sound critical basis for evaluating subsequent Asian American literary writings. Narrating Nationalisms synthesizes the literary discourse and critical debates within the field in a crucial period of post - World War II Asian American literary history, and specifies the components of "Asian American cultural nationalism" in ways that have not yet been attempted. This book will be compelling reading for those working in American literature, critical theory, cultural history, and ethnic studies.

This book bridges comparative literature and American studies by using an intercultural and bilingual approach to Chinese American literature. King-Kok Cheung launches a new transnational exchange by examining both Chinese and Chinese American writers. Part 1 presents alternative forms of masculinity that transcend conventional associations of valor with aggression. It examines gender refashioning in light of the Chinese dyadic ideal of wen-wu (verbal arts and martial arts), while redefining both in the process. Part 2 highlights the writers’ formal innovations by presenting alternative autobiography, theory, metafiction, and translation. In doing so, Cheung puts in relief the literary experiments of the writers, who interweave hybrid poetics with two-pronged geopolitical critiques. The writers examined provide a reflexive lens through which transpacific audiences are beckoned to view the “other” country and to look homeward without blinders.

This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is an imperative to historicize its practices - including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures - as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field's interests. These rationales are fully contextualized in the book's Introduction and Conclusion. The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into 8 chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship with the trends in other disciplines. What has emerged and been given prominence to in the surveys and discussions of this book then constitute the essential criticism of Asian American literary studies, a discourse almost 5 decades in the making when examined retrospectively.

Traces American writers whose roots are in all parts of Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.

Form as function in Asian American literature.

This book examines the influence of genre on contemporary Asian American literary production. Drawing on cultural theories of representation, social theories of identity, and poststructuralist genre theory, this study shows how popular prose fictions have severely constrained the development of Asian American literary aesthetics.

This volume examines the concerns - political, literary, and identity-based - of contemporary Asian American literatures in neoliberal times.