Immigrant Fictions

Immigrant Fictions
Author: Rebecca Walkowitz
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2010-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0299221334

Immigrant Fictions is a groundbreaking collection that brings together studies of world literature, book history, narrative theory, and the contemporary novel to challenge methods of critical reading based on national models of literary culture. Contributors suggest that contemporary novels by immigrant writers need to be read across several geographies of production, circulation, and translation. Analyzing work by David Peace, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Iva Pekarkova, Yan Geling, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anchee Min, and Monica Ali, these essays take up a range of critical topics, including the transnational book and the migrant writer, the comparative reception history of postcolonial fiction, transnational criticism and Asian-American literature in the U. S., mobility and feminism in translation, linguistic mediation and immigrating fictions, migration and the politics of narrative form.

Fictions of Migration

Fictions of Migration
Author: Lorena Cuya Gavilano
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-03-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9780814214657

Analyzes the impact of political and economic trends on migration narratives and films in Peru and Bolivia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Migrating Fictions

Migrating Fictions
Author: Abigail G. H. Manzella
Publisher:
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814213582

A multiethnic study of how race, gender, and citizenship affected major twentieth-century internal migrations in U.S. history and narrative.

Immigrant, Montana

Immigrant, Montana
Author: Amitava Kumar
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2018-07-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525520767

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK ONE OF THE NEW YORKER’S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR Carrying a single suitcase, Kailash arrives in post-Reagan America from India to attend graduate school. As he begins to settle into American existence, Kailash comes under the indelible influence of a charismatic professor, and also finds his life reshaped by a series of very different women with whom he recklessly falls in and out of love. Looking back on the formative period of his youth, Kailash’s wry, vivid perception of the world he is in, but never quite of, unfurls in a brilliant melding of anecdote and annotation, picture and text. Building a case for himself, both as a good man in spite of his flaws and as an American in defiance of his place of birth, Kailash weaves a story that is at its core an incandescent investigation of love—despite, beyond, and across dividing lines.

The Middleman

The Middleman
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802196349

A National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times Notable Book: “intelligent, versatile . . . profound” stories of migration in America (The Washington Post Book World). Illuminating a new world of people in migration that has transformed the essence of America, these collected stories are a dazzling display of the vision of this critically-acclaimed contemporary writer. An aristocratic Filipina negotiates a new life for herself with an Atlanta investment banker. A Vietnam vet returns to Florida, a place now more foreign than the Asia of his war experience. An Indian widow tries to explain her culture’s traditions of grieving to her well-intentioned friends. And in the title story, an Iraqi Jew whose travels have ended in Queens suddenly finds himself an unwitting guerrilla in a South American jungle. Passionate, comic, violent, and tender, these stories draw us into a cultural fusion in the midst of its birth pangs, expressing a “consummated romance with the American language” (The New York Times Book Review).

Holder of the World

Holder of the World
Author: Bharati Mukherjee
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2011-06-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307792285

“An amazing literary feat and a masterpiece of storytelling. Once again, Bharati Mukherjee prove she is one of our foremost writers, with the literary muscles to weave both the future and the past into a tale that is singularly intelligent and provocative.”—Amy Tan This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, “a person undreamed of in Puritan society.” Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, “translating" herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja. It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an “asset hunter” who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative's life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah's journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with “sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography....”

American Migrant Fictions

American Migrant Fictions
Author: Sonia Weiner
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004364013

In American Migrant Fictions: Space, Narrative, Identity, Sonia Weiner focuses on novels of five American migrant writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, who construct spatial paradigms within their narratives to explore questions of linguistic diversity, identities and be-longings. By weaving visual techniques within their narratives (photography, comics, cartography) authors Aleksandar Hemon, G.B. Tran, Junot Díaz, Boris Fishman and Vikram Chandra convey a surplus of perspectives and gesture towards alternative spaces, spatial in-between-ness and transnational space.

Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction

Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction
Author: Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2011-07-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136645543

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Food Studies and American literary scholarship, Piatti-Farnell investigates the significances of food and eating in American fiction, from 1980 to the present day. She argues that culturally-coded representations of the culinary illuminate contemporary American anxieties about class gender, race, tradition, immigration, nationhood, and history. As she offers a critical analysis of major works of contemporary fiction, Piatti-Farnell unveils contrasting modes of culinary nostalgia, disillusionment, and progress that pervasively address the cultural disintegration of local and familiar culinary values, in favor of globalized economies of consumption. In identifying different incarnations of the "American culinary," Piatti-Farnell covers the depiction of food in specific categories of American fiction and explores how the cultural separation that molds food preferences inevitably challenges the existence of a homogenous American identity. The study treads on new grounds since it not only provides the first comprehensive study of food and consumption in contemporary American fiction, but also aims to expose interrelated politics of consumption in a variety of authors from different ethnic, cultural, racial and social backgrounds within the United States.

New Strangers in Paradise

New Strangers in Paradise
Author: Gilbert H. Muller
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813150132

New Strangers in Paradise offers the first in-depth account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive generations of immigrants to reach U.S. shores. Gilbert Muller reveals how the intersections of peoples, regions, and competing cultural histories have remade the American cultural landscape in the aftermath of World War II. Muller focuses on the literature of Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Caribbeans, and Asian Americans. In the quest for a new identity, each of these groups seeks the American dream and rewrites the story of what it means to be an American. New Strangers in Paradise explores the psychology of uprooted peoples and the relations of culture and power, addressing issues of race and ethnicity, multiculturalism and pluralism, and national and international conflicts. Examining the groups of immigrants in the cultural and historical context both of America and of the lands from which they originated, Muller argues that this "fourth wave" of immigration has led to a creative flowering in modern fiction. The book offers a fresh perspective on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Sual Bellow, William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others.