Chinese American Literature without Borders

Chinese American Literature without Borders
Author: King-Kok Cheung
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2017-02-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137441771

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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.

Articulate Silences

Articulate Silences
Author: King-Kok Cheung
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501721127

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In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that suppresses the voicing of minority experiences. Yet at the same time, they demonstrate how silences—voiceless gestures, textual ellipses, authorial hesitations—can themselves be articulate. Drawing on theoretical works on women's writing, on ethnicity and race, and on postmodernism and history, Cheung takes issue with Anglo-American feminists who valorize speech unequivocally and with revisionist Asian American male critics who attempt to refute Orientalist stereotypes by renouncing silence. She challenges Eurocentric views of speech and silence as polarized, hierarchical, and gendered, and proposes an approach to Asian American literature which overturns the "East-West" or "dual personality" model. Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa interweave speech and silence, narration and ellipses, autobiography and fiction as they adapt and recast Asian and Euro-American precursors. Drawing freely from both traditions, they reinvent the past by decentering, disseminating, and interrogating authority-but not by reappropriating it. A fresh and subtle response to issues relating to cultural diversity, Articulate Silences will be important reading for scholars and students in the fie,4s of literary theory and criticism, women's studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies.

Reading the Literatures of Asian America

Reading the Literatures of Asian America
Author: Shirley Lim
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781439901212

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A unique collection of essays explores the diversity of Asian American literature from the 19th century to the present.

Asian American Literature

Asian American Literature
Author: Keith Lawrence
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2021-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1440872899

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Asian American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students is an invaluable resource for students curious to know more about Asian North American writers, texts, and the issues and drives that motivate their writing. This volume collects, in one place, a breadth of information about Asian American literary and cultural history as well as the authors and texts that best define it. A dozen contextual essays introduce fundamental elements or subcategories of Asian American literature, expanding on social and literary concerns or tensions that are familiar and relevant. Essays include the origins and development of the term "Asian American"; overviews of Asian American and Asian Canadian social and literary histories; essays on Asian American identity, gender issues, and sexuality; and discussions of Asian American rhetoric and children's literature. More than 120 alphabetical entries round out the volume and cover important Asian North American authors. Historical information is presented in clear and engaging ways, and author entries emphasize biographical or textual details that are significant to contemporary young adults. Special attention has been given to pioneering authors from the late 19th century through the early 1970s and to influential or well-known contemporary authors, especially those likely to be studied in high school or university classrooms.

Eurasia Without Borders

Eurasia Without Borders
Author: Katerina Clark
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674261100

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A long-awaited corrective to the controversial idea of world literature, from a major voice in the field. Katerina Clark charts interwar efforts by Soviet, European, and Asian leftist writers to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that would overcome national, cultural, and linguistic differences in the name of an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and later antifascist aesthetic. At the heart of this story stands the literary arm of the Communist International, or Comintern, anchored in Moscow but reaching Baku, Beijing, London, and parts in between. Its mission attracted diverse networks of writers who hailed from Turkey, Iran, India, and China, as well as the Soviet Union and Europe. Between 1919 and 1943, they sought to establish a new world literature to rival the capitalist republic of Western letters. Eurasia without Borders revises standard accounts of global twentieth-century literary movements. The Eurocentric discourse of world literature focuses on transatlantic interactions, largely omitting the international left and its Asian members. Meanwhile, postcolonial studies have overlooked the socialist-aligned world in favor of the clash between Western European imperialism and subaltern resistance. Clark provides the missing pieces, illuminating a distinctive literature that sought to fuse European and vernacular Asian traditions in the name of a post-imperialist culture. Socialist literary internationalism was not without serious problems, and at times it succumbed to an orientalist aesthetic that rivaled any coming from Europe. Its history is marked by both promise and tragedy. With clear-eyed honesty, Clark traces the limits, compromises, and achievements of an ambitious cultural collaboration whose resonances in later movements can no longer be ignored.

Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature

Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature
Author: Begoña Simal-González
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2020-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030356183

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Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature: Gold Mountains, Weedflowers, and Murky Globes offers an ecocritical reinterpretation of Asian American literature. The book considers more than a century of Asian American writing, from Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) to Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), through an ecocritical lens. The volume explores the most relevant landmarks in Asian American literature: the first-contact narratives written by Bulosan, Kingston, Mukherjee, and Jen; the controversial texts published by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) at the time of the Yellow Peril; the rise of cultural nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrated by Wong’s Homebase and Kingston’s China Men; old and recent examples of “internment literature” dealing with the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII (Sone, Houston, Miyake, Kadohata); and the new trends in Asian American literature since the 1990s, exemplified by Yamashita’s and Ozeki’s novels, which explore the challenges of our transnational, transnatural era. Begoña Simal-González’s ecocritical readings of these texts provide crucial interdisciplinary insights, addressing and analyzing important narratives within Asian American culture and literature.

Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater

Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater
Author: Wenying Xu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1538157322

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A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.

The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture

The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture
Author: Lydia R. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2021-12-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000504956

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Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures. Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

Literary Fantasy in Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Women's Literature

Literary Fantasy in Contemporary Chinese Diasporic Women's Literature
Author: Fang Tang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2019-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498595472

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This book explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchy and unsettling fixed notions of home. The idea of home explored in this book relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects in constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations. Fantasy is seen to operate in the corpus of this book as a literary mode, as defined by Rosemary Jackson. Literary fantasy offers a way to rework ancient myths, fairy tales, ghost stories and legends; it also subverts conventional narratives and challenges the power of patriarchy and other dominant ideologies. Through a critical reading of four diasporic Chinese women authors, namely, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adeline Yen Mah, Ying Chen and Larissa Lai, this book aims to offer critical insights into how their works re-imagine a ‘home’ through literary fantasy which leads beyond nationalist and Orientalist stereotypes; and how essentialist conceptions of diasporic culture are challenged by global geopolitics and cultural interactions.

Where I Have Never Been

Where I Have Never Been
Author: Patricia P. Chu
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1439902267

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In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents’ ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic “returns”: first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives—including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others—register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory.