San Antonio College Library

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...

'Complicating Instructions' is an important contribution to contemporary understandings of race and ethnicity, offering truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of literature and culture.

"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,...

"James P. Beckwourth, a half-black fur trader; Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, a Paiute translator; Salishan author Mourning Dove; Cherokee novelist John Rollin Ridge; Sui Sin Far, an Anglo-Chinese short story writer, and her sister, romance novelist Onoto Watanna; and Mary Austin, a white southwestern writer - each of these intercultural writers faces a rite of passage into a new social order. Their writings negotiate their various frontier ordeals: the...

"Nothing is "pure" in America, and indeed the rich ethnic mix that constitutes our society accounts for much of its amazing vitality. In this major new study, Werner Sollors takes a wide-ranging and provocative look at the role of "ethnicity' in American literature and what that literature has said - and continues to say - about our diverse culture. Ethnic consciousness, the author contends, is a constituent feature of modernism, not its antithesis....

The relationship between humans and their gods has always been a primary theme in literature. Until recently, however, books in the American literary canon have rarely been concerned with any supernatural beings other than the Judeo-Christian god. In this book Bonnie Winsbro moves beyond that narrow focus to examine the power of the supernatural in the works of six ethnic writers: Lee Smith's Oral History, Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Leslie Marmon Silko's...