1st Edition

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology

    244 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    244 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narrative, race, and ethnicity in the United States. Situated at the intersection of post-classical narratology and context-oriented approaches in race, ethnic, and cultural studies, the contributions to this edited volume interrogate the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity, along with other important identity markers such as class, religion, gender, and sexuality. Importantly, the book also explores how paying attention to the formal features of ethnic American literatures changes our under-standing of narrative theory and how narrative theories can help us to think about author functions and race. The international and diverse group of contributors includes top scholars in narrative theory and in race and ethnic studies, and the texts they analyze concern a wide variety of topics, from the representation of time and space to the narration of trauma and other deeply emotional memories to the importance of literary paratexts, genre structures, and author functions.

    Foreword: Ethnoracial Encounters: From Myopic to Polyscopic Planetary Narratologies

    Frederick Luis Aldama

    Introduction: Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures

    Alexa Weik von Mossner

    PART 1: Narrating Race and Ethnicity across Time and Space

    1. Indigenous Time / Indigenous Narratives: The Political Implications of Non-Linear Time in Contemporary Native Fiction
    2. James J. Donahue

    3. Time(s) of Race: Narrative Temporalities, Epistemic Storytelling, and the Human Species in Ted Chiang
    4. Matthias Klestil

    5. Polychronic Narration, Trauma, Disenfranchised Grief, and Mario Alberto Zambrano’s Lotería
    6. Mario Grill

    7. Whole New Worlds: An Exploration of Narrative Strategies Used in Afrodiasporic Speculative Fiction
    8. Marlene D. Allen Ahmed

      PART 2: Haunting Memories: Narrative, Race, and Emotion

    9. Emotions that Haunt: Attachment Relations in Lan Samantha Chang’s Fiction
    10. W. Michelle Wang

    11. Race, Trauma, and the Emotional Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing
    12. Marijana Mikić

    13. "There Were Strands of Darker Stories": Reading Third-Generation Holocaust Literature as Midrash
    14. Stella Setka

    15. Stories, Love, and Baklava: Narrating Food in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Culinary Memoirs
    16. Alexa Weik von Mossner

      PART 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Paratexts: Genre Structures and Author Functions

    17. Healing Narratives: Historical Representations in Latinx Young Adult Literature
    18. Elizabeth Garcia

    19. Blood and Soil: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
    20. Patrick Colm Hogan

    21. Metaparatextual Satire in Percival Everett’s The Book of Training and Kent Monkman’s Shame and Prejudice
    22. Derek C. Maus

    23. Author Functions, Literary Functions, and Racial Representations or What We Talk about When We Talk about Diversifying Narrative Studies

               Jennifer Ho

    Biography

    Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria.

    Marijana Mikić is a PhD researcher on the FWF-funded project “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures” at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria.

    Mario Grill is a PhD researcher on the FWF-funded project “Narrative Encounters with Ethnic American Literatures” at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.