A recent explosion of publishing activity by a wide range of talented
writers has placed Asian American literature in the limelight. As the
field of Asian American literary studies gains increasing recognition,
however, questions of misreading and appropriation inevitably arise. How
is the growing body of Asian American works to be read? What holds them
together to constitute a tradition? What distinguishes this tradition
from the "mainstream" canon and other "minority" literatures? In the
first comprehensive book on Asian American literature since Elaine Kim's
ground- breaking 1982 volume, Sau-ling Wong addresses these issues and
explores their implications for the multiculturalist agenda.Wong does so
by establishing the "intertextuality" of Asian American literature
through the study of four motifs--food and eating, the Doppelg, nger
figure, mobility, and play--in their multiple sociohistorical contexts.
Occurring across ethnic subgroup, gender, class, generational, and
historical boundaries, these motifs resonate with each other in
distinctly Asian American patterns that universalistic theories cannot
uncover. Two rhetorical figures from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman
Warrior, "Necessity" and "Extravagance, " further unify this original,
wide-ranging investigation. Authors studied include Carlos Bulosan,
Frank Chin, Ashley Sheun Dunn, David Henry Hwang, Lonny Kaneko, Maxine
Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, David Wong Louie, Darrell Lum, Wing Tek Lum,
Toshio Mori, Bharati Mukherjee, Fae Myenne Ng, Bienvenido Santos, Monica
Sone, Amy Tan, Yoshiko Uchida, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako
Yamauchi.
