Immigrant Fictions. Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization

Contemporary Literature, March 2007  :

Immigrant Fictions
Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization
Edited by Rebecca L. Walkowitz

Immigrant Fictions is a groundbreaking collection that brings together studies of world literature, book history, narrative theory, and the contemporary novel to challenge methods of critical reading based on national models of literary culture. Contributors suggest that contemporary novels by immigrant writers need to be read across several geographies of production, circulation, and translation. Analyzing work by David Peace, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Iva Pekarkova, Yan Geling, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anchee Min, and Monica Ali, these essays take up a range of critical topics, including the transnational book and the migrant writer, the comparative reception history of postcolonial fiction, transnational criticism and Asian-American literature in the U.S., mobility and feminism in translation, linguistic mediation and immigrating fictions, migration and the politics of narrative form.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation, and the coeditor, with Douglas Mao, of a volume of essays entitled Bad Modernisms. She is the coeditor of five other books, including The Turn to Ethics and Media Spectacles, and her articles have appeared in ELH, MLQ, Modern Drama, Contemporary Literature, and the Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Literature, 1945–2000. She is an associate editor of the journal Contemporary Literature and a member of the executive committee of the MLA Division on Twentieth-Century English Literature.

Contributors:

 
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Matthew Hart, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; Wen Jin, Columbia University; Eric Hayot, University of Arizona; Vera Eliásová, Rutgers University; J. Dillon Brown, Brooklyn College, CUNY and Alistair Cormack, University of East Anglia

Table of Contents:

Rebecca L. Walkowitz, "The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer"

Matthew Hart, "An Interview with David Peace"

Wen Jin, "Transnational Criticism and Asian Immigrant Literature in the U. S.: Reading Yan Geling's Fusang and Its English Translation"

Eric Hayot, "Immigrating Fictions: Unfailing Mediation in Dictée and Becoming Madame Mao"

Vera Eliásová, "A Cab of Her Own: Immigration and Mobility in Iva Pekarkova's Gimme the Money"

J. Dillon Brown, "Exile and Cunning: The Tactical Difficulties of George Lamming"

Alistair Cormack, "Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form: Realism and the Postcolonial Subject in Brick Lane"