This book analyzes and offers fresh insights into the trickster tradition including African American, American Indian, Euro-American, Asian American, and Latino/a stories, Morgan examines the oral roots of each racial/ethnic group to reveal how each group's history, frustrations, and aspirations have molded the tradition in contemporary literature.

Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters—ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds—on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.

Rediscovering the writings of early Asian America.

This book argues that in US literature, discourse on the themes of race and ecology is too narrowly focused on the twentieth century and does not adequately take into account how these themes are interrelated. This study broadens the field by looking at writings from the nineteenth century.

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 scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition: is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays explores realism's genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts--poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film--and to pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

In this provocative study of eight novels, Karen E. Beardslee asserts that American writers often engage with folk traditions as a necessary part of their characters journeys to wholeness. Focusing not only on African American, Native American, and Hispanic American cultures but also on women s culture, Beardslee traces the connections between folk legacies and the search for selfhood in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Within each chapter, a novel by a contemporary author and one from an earlier period are brought together: Whitney Otto s How to Make an American Quilt and Harriet Beecher Stowe s The Minister s Wooing; David Bradley s The Chaneysville Incident and Charles Chesnutt s The Conjure Woman; Leslie Marmon Silko s Ceremony and Zitkala-Sa s American Indian Stories; and Roberta Fernandez s Intaglio and Maria Cristina Mena s The Birth of the God of War. These pairings are not based on matters of intertextuality or influence but are chosen according to the folk groups to which the novels characters belong. This strategy enables Beardslee to trace the particular legacies that inform the work of the twentieth-century authors. As Beardslee notes, contemporary texts and the critical commentary on them have focused, until fairly recently, on the search for self in male (usually white) characters. Such works have also positioned that search outside the character s family or community and have usually emphasized its futility. With the growing shift toward multiculturalism in fiction, however, folk traditions have come to play an increasingly crucial role in characters journeys to self-awareness as well as in the success of those journeys. Thoroughly researched and cogently argued, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of both folklore and literature as it explores the relationship between knowing one s cultural heritage and achieving a sense of self that is whole instead of fragmented, connected instead of drifting. The Author: Karen E. Beardslee teaches in the Department of Language and Literature at Burlington County College in Pemberton, New Jersey. Her articles have appeared in MELUS, The Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature, and the Zora Neale Hurston Forum. "

The second phase of the civil rights movement (1965-1973) was a pivotal period in the development of ethnic groups in the United States. In the years since then, new generations have asked new questions to cast light on this watershed era. No longer is it productive to consider only the differences between ethnic groups; we must also study them in relation to one another and to U.S. mainstream society. In "Shakin' Up" Race and Gender, Marta E. Sánchez creates an intercultural frame to study the historical and cultural connections among Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Chicanos/as since the 1960s. Her frame opens up the black/white binary that dominated the 1960s and 1970s. It reveals the hidden yet real ties that connected ethnics of color and "white" ethnics in a shared intercultural history. By using key literary works published during this time, Sánchez reassesses and refutes the unflattering portrayals of ethnics by three leading intellectuals (Octavio Paz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Oscar Lewis) who wrote about Chicanos, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans. She links their implicit misogyny to the trope of La Malinche from Chicano culture and shows how specific characteristics of this trope—enslavement, alleged betrayal, and cultural negotiation—are also present in African American and Puerto Rican cultures. Sánchez employs the trope to restore the agency denied to these groups. Intercultural contact—encounters between peoples of distinct ethnic groups—is the theme of this book.

Volume 3 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather?s work for the informed reader or the specialized student. In fourteen essays, critics and scholars examine Cather?s Catholic Progressivism, her literary relations with William Faulkner, and her place in the multicultural canon of American literature.