San Antonio College Library

"Joining the current debates in American literary history, José David Saldívar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies. Saldívar pursues...

The contributors argue from a variety of perspectives for the expansion and redefinition of "American" literature to include a more representative selection of works. The book is organized in three major sections on redefining the American literary canon, oral dimensions of American literature, and critical and historical perspectives. Topics range from detailed analysis of oral traditions in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) to historical...

"The first comprehensive study of Spanish writings on East and Southeast Asia from the Spanish colonial period, They Need Nothing draws attention to many essential but understudied Spanish-language texts from this era. Robert Richmond Ellis provides an engaging, interdisciplinary examination of how these writings depict Asia and Asians as both similar to and different from Europe and Europeans, and details how East and Southeast Asians reacted to...

"This collection of twelve essays focuses on a variety of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts to illustrate the unprecedented flexibility of the realist mode in American fiction and poetry. As the volume demonstrates, the realist era was hospitable to a multitude of writers - including Mark Twain, W.D. Howells, and Bret Harte, as well as such newly canonized figures as Marietta Holly, Abraham Cahan, Frances Ellen Harper, Sui Sin Far,...

Challenges the prevailing notion that the work of all American writers reflects a sense of determined individualism.

Presents a resource containing 101 booktalks on multicultural fiction and history meant to help young readers achieve the goals of No Child Left Behind, improve progress, and become better citizens.

"The short-story cycle - a literary genre as ancient as A Thousand and One Nights and as modern as James Joyce's Dubliners - has rapidly ascended over the last twenty years to become one of the dominant forms in American fiction. Most scholars and book reviewers, however, lack awareness of the short-story cycle's rich legacy and consistently misconstrue new works of the genre as "novels." James Nagel offers the first systematic history and definition...

The 1930s concern with recording the speaking voice is virtually unrivaled in American cultural history. In that decade, scores of writers traveled into the field to record the voices of African Americans, American Indians, migrant workers, tenant farmers, and immigrants. In this innovative study, Michael E. Staub recasts 1930s cultural history by analyzing those genres so characteristic of the Depression era: genres that relied on a presumed relationship...