Book Series Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature

Aim & Scope

The series locates itself within the field of comparative American studies, and focuses specifically on the analysis and criticism of the so-called “ethnic” American literatures. The orientation of the series is, explicitly, for the literary analysis to merge the political with the imaginative, and the culturally-specific with the cross-cultural. As an intercultural endeavor, the series assumes the inextricable link between standards of aesthetic value and power; aesthetic judgments are not made in an vacuum but are rather intimately connected with dominant cultural standards of value. In this sense, intercultural literary analysis should address issues of race, ethnicity, class and gender, while it focuses on literary topics, therefore occupying the interspace between the political and the aesthetic. By ethnic American literature is understood the multiethnic literatures of the United States, with an emphasis on the comparative analysis of the different traditions (including African American literature, Asian American literature, Native American lit., Chicano and US latino literature, as well as other so called hyphenated or immigrant writers with non-US background like Indian writers, Arab American writers, European American writers, etc.). The series focus is mostly comparative, multiethnic, and intercultural, but would also love to feature analyses of single ethnic traditions. The volumes in the series offer clear and comprehensive approaches to selected topics (such as magical realism, border theory, and others), covering the different implications of each topic to the development of ethnic American literatures. Volumes then proceed to comparative literary analyses of carefully selected works from each ethnic tradition. Volumes should offer interrelated contributions. Each volume should consist of long articles, carefully designed to cover the whole field under study. Each article should offer a general, theoretical exploration of a particular topic, as well as argue a particular point. ^[1]

Go to Website