1st Edition

Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner

By Randy Boyagoda Copyright 2008
    156 Pages
    by Routledge

    156 Pages
    by Routledge

    Salman Rushdie once observed that William Faulkner was the writer most frequently cited by third world authors as their major influence. Inspired by the unexpected lines of influence and sympathy that Rushdie’s statement implied, this book seeks to understand connections between American and global experience as discernible in twentieth-century fiction. The worldwide imprint of modern American experience has, of late, invited reappraisals of canonical writers and classic national themes from globalist perspectives. Advancing this line of critical inquiry, this book argues that the work of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner reveals a century-long transformation of how American identity and experience have been imagined, and that these transformations have been provoked by new forms of immigration and by unanticipated mixings of cultures and ethnic groups. This book makes two innovations: first, it places a contemporary world writer’s fiction in an American context; second, it places two modern American writers’ novels in a world context. Works discussed include Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Satanic Verses; Ellison’s Invisible Man and Juneteenth; and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The scholarly materials range from U.S. immigration history and critical race theory to contemporary studies of cultural and economic globalization.

    Preface Acknowledgments Chapter One: Imagining Nation and Imaginary Americans Chapter Two: Salman Rushdie’s American Idyll Chapter Three: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Immigrants Chapter Four: William Faulkner’s Durn Furriners Chapter Five: Americans You’ll Never (Have To) Be Notes Bibliography Index

    Biography

    Scholar, critic and novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of American Literature at Ryerson University in Toronto. He is the author of Governor of the Northern Province, a novel, and contributes literary and cultural criticism to a series of North American publications, including Harper’s and The Walrus.