The Asian American Renaissance - (Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture) by Mai Wang (Hardcover)

About the Book

Uncovers the previously neglected links between the nineteenth-century American canon and twentieth-century Asian American writers.

Book Synopsis

How do transnational Asian American novels and poems reimagine the classics of nineteenth-century American literature? The Asian American Renaissance: Literary Encounters Across Time is the first scholarly investigation into the formal and archival links between canonical authors such as Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville and their twentieth-century Asian American counterparts. It investigates how a transnational group of authors--Carlos Bulosan, Younghill Kang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eileen Chang--inherit the American Renaissance as both a racial allegory and a supplier of literary forms such as the romance and the jeremiad.

Review Quotes

The Asian American Renaissance offers a fascinating account of how Asian American authors have incorporated the ideas, authors and texts of the 'American Renaissance' to critique liberalism and explore questions of Asian belonging. Required reading for those interested in nineteenth-century American and Asian American literature.--Julia H. Lee, University of California, Irvine