A collection of ten immigrant stories from 1773 to 1986 by men and women from European, Latin American, and Asian countries which are based on letters, diaries, and oral histories.

This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

Salman Rushdie once observed that William Faulkner was the writer most frequently cited by third world authors as their major influence. Inspired by the unexpected lines of influence and sympathy that Rushdie’s statement implied, this book seeks to understand connections between American and global experience as discernible in twentieth-century fiction. The worldwide imprint of modern American experience has, of late, invited reappraisals of canonical writers and classic national themes from globalist perspectives. Advancing this line of critical inquiry, this book argues that the work of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner reveals a century-long transformation of how American identity and experience have been imagined, and that these transformations have been provoked by new forms of immigration and by unanticipated mixings of cultures and ethnic groups. This book makes two innovations: first, it places a contemporary world writer’s fiction in an American context; second, it places two modern American writers’ novels in a world context. Works discussed include Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Satanic Verses; Ellison’s Invisible Man and Juneteenth; and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The scholarly materials range from U.S. immigration history and critical race theory to contemporary studies of cultural and economic globalization.

"A Lower East Side Tenement Museum book."

Latinx Writing Los Angeles offers a critical anthology of Los Angeles’s most significant English-language and Spanish-language (in translation) nonfiction writing from the city’s inception to the present. Contemporary Latinx authors, including three Pulitzer Prize winners and writers such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Rubén Martínez, focus on the ways in which Latinx Los Angeles’s nonfiction narratives record the progressive racialization and subalternization of Latinxs in the southwestern United States. While notions of racial memory, coloniality, biopolitics, internal colonialism, cultural assimilation, Mexican or pan-Latinx cultural nationalism, and transnationalism permeate this anthology, contributors advocate the idea of a contested modernity that refuses to accept mainstream cultural impositions, proposing instead alternative ways of knowing and understanding. Featuring a wide variety of voices as well as a diversity of subgenres, this collection is the first to illuminate divergent, hybrid Latinx histories and cultures. Redefining Los Angeles’s literary history and providing a new model for English, Spanish, and Latinx studies, Latinx Writing Los Angeles is an essential contribution to southwestern and borderland studies.

Journeys beyond the Pale is the first book to examine how Yiddish writers, from Mendele Moycher Sforim to Der Nister to the famed Sholem Aleichem, used motifs of travel to express their complicated relationship with modernization. The story of the Jews of the Pale of settlement encompasses current-day Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland.

Working Women, Literary Ladies explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development. It is the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As women entered the public sphere as workers, their opportunities for intellectual growth expanded, even as those same opportunities were often tightly circumscribed by the factory owners who were providing them. These developments, both institutional and personal, opened up a range of new possibilities for working-class women that profoundly affected women of all classes and the larger social fabric. Cook examines the extraordinary and diverse literary productions of these working women, ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of female factory life, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. This vital new book traces the hopes and tensions generated by the expectations of working-class women as they created a wholly new way of being alive in the world.