The Asian American RenaissanceLiterary Encounters Across Time

Uncovers the previously neglected links between the nineteenth-century American canon and twentieth-century Asian American writers

• Bridges studies of nineteenth-century American literature with readings of twentieth-century diasporic Asian American texts
• Advances a new formalist framework for understanding the influence of canonical authors such as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson on minority authors
• Presents new archival research documenting the historic links between the major figures of the American Renaissance and the diasporic Asian American writers who encountered their works

How do transnational Asian American novels and poems reimagine the classics of nineteenth-century American literature? The Asian American Renaissance: Literary Encounters Across Time is the first scholarly investigation into the formal and archival links between canonical authors such as Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville and their twentieth-century Asian American counterparts. It investigates how a transnational group of authors—Carlos Bulosan, Younghill Kang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eileen Chang—inherit the American Renaissance as both a racial allegory and a supplier of literary forms such as the romance and the jeremiad.