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Beyond Literary Chinatown
Jeffrey F.L. Partridge
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The phenomenon of "literary Chinatown"—the ghettoization of Chinese American literature—was produced by the same dynamics of race and representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into literal Chinatowns. Jeffrey F. L. Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to these expectations posed by recent Chinese American texts, challenges that push our understanding of a multicultural society to new horizons. Partridge builds on the concept of a “reading horizon”—a set of expectations and assumptions that a reader brings to a text—to explore the crucial interplay between reader, author, and text. Arguing that authors like Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Shawn Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and David Wong Louie are aware of their readers' horizons and write to challenge those assumptions, Partridge demonstrates how their writings function as a potent medium of cultural transformation.
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Cover Page
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Copyright Page
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Dedication
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Table of Contents
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Preface
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Acknowledgments
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INTRODUCTION: Reading Horizons
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PART I: Literary Chinatown and the Reader’s Horizon
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1. Literary Chinatown: Dynamics of Race and Reading
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2. What Is an Ethnic Author?
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PART II: Exceeding the Margins
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3. The Politics of Ethnic Authorship
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4. Claiming Diaspora in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Joss and Gold
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PART III: Change and the Phenomenology of Reading
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5. Changing Signifiers and Changing Horizons
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6. Change and the Playful Reader: Reading Shawn Wong’s American Knees
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7. Beyond Multicultural: Cultural Hybridity in the Novels of Gish Jen
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Conclusion: The Emergence of the Polycultural
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Notes
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Bibliography
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 2007
Publisher: University of Washington Press
- 9780295987064 (paperback)