Product Description

In the United States, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ralph Ellison, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn are among the notable writers of color who have emerged since World War II. Although definitely individual and widely diverse, they are all-American in their collective mixture of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic strains. The work of each, although distinct, has not remained in cultural isolation but has enriched the inclusive literary treasury of the United States.

This comprehensive, timely study by a British scholar closely examines their fiction and autobiographical writings in cultural perspective. It analyzes the ways politics and popular tradition have influenced their work and the ways these ethnic authors address and question such matters as whiteness, autobiography, geography, and the forms of prose.

Other books have explored the variety of ethnic traditions in American literature, but this is the first to consider them in comparative terms in a single volume. In focusing on these writers and their place in the context of American history and contemporary popular culture, Multicultural American Literature underlines the reality that it is multicultural writing that has revolutionized recent American literary history.

For those wishing clear and accurate perspective on the national literature of the present day, this informative book analyzes the spectrum and provides an exact and faithful view of its multicultural character.

A. Robert Lee, a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo, is the author of Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America and, with Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #294726 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 307 pages

From the Publisher
Winner of a 2004 Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, this is a comparative analysis of the recent ethnic writing that has enlarged the spectrum of American literature.

From the Inside Flap
A comparative analysis of recent ethnic writing that has enlarged the spectrum of American literature

About the Author
A. Robert Lee, a professor of American literature at Nihon University in Tokyo, is the author of Designs of Blackness: Mappins in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America and, with Gerald Visenor, Postidian Conversation.

Customer Reviews

Readable, Crosscutting Literary History
What A. Robert Lee has accomplished in Multicultural American Literature is a rare feat in the world of books, a thoroughly readable text that makes its scholarly subject accessable to a wide readership. Lee's style is as important as his comprehensive treatment of the recent history of U.S. literatures of race and ethnicity. It is not surprising that his effort garnered the American Book Award, although one certainly does not have to be American to appreciate Lee's deft touch.

While Multicultural American Literature focuses on the writing that has emerged from American racial and ethnic communities in the post-Civil Rights era, Lee provides a broader context for understanding this work. Moreover, his text is carefully nuanced. It is not enough to say that he examines developments in African-American, Asian-American, Latino/a, and American Indian literatures. He looks at the complex interaction of voices within each of these broad categories. Tribal writers assert cultural differences as well as similarities. Chicano writers share a language with their contemporaries from Puerto Rico and the Hispanic West Indies, but here, too, there are important cultural differences.

Lee, further, tackles head on one of the most important questions concerning American ethnic literatures today: their relationship to the mainstream postmodernism that emerged during the very same time frame. His concluding chapter stands as a reminder of the most important lesson to come from the scholarly examination of multicultural writing, that there is an American writing of whiteness and that raciality of all colors is an ideological artifact.

Multicultural American Literature is a tribute to the complexity of the racial subject in the United States.

skims without depth
This book is a general survey with many pages of summary of both primary and secondary literature but very little analysis. It fits lots of titles into its broad discussion but offers neither insightful interpretation nor adequate interrogation of the criticism or theory that is needed to interpret the literature. I bought this hoping it would help me prepare to teach a college-level course on the subject and was sorely disappointed.

the best fundament to built further researches on!!
I can only highly recommend A. Robert Lee's *Multicultural American Literature* to anyone interested, in the broadest sense, in American Literature. I am working on my PhD and am using Lee's book for my thesis as I have used it already to earn my Magister Artium.
I fail to comprehend how some reviewers can claim Lee's book to be unorganized, it is very well structured and easy to follow and yet it offers new insights to even advanced researchers.
At first there is a general introduction to the topic and the problematic of *Multicultural American Literature,* the dilemma of authors with a mixed ancestry unable to claim one cultural heritage as their own and only true one.
Then follows an overview of the most leading authors of various ethnic groups, that are easily overlooked in a canon still mostly made up of DWAS. Then Lee focuses on the themes which are common across all ethnic groups making up *Multicultural American Literature*. Then he leads the reader on to a brief history of African American literature, Native American literature, Chicano/a Literature and Asian American literature. He discusses similarities and differences between and within each ethnic group--just as well as the Native American's dilemma of being pressed in one nation but actually being a kaleidoscopic group of nations.
Lee even includes Island America.
Of course after reading *Multicultural American Literature* one does not know all about American Literature but has one of the best fundaments to build further researches on and a fair knowledge of the often neglected and falsely called minority literature.