Asian American Renaissance

Mai Wang is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her critical and creative work has been published in Amerasia Journal, The Hopkins Review, Hyphen Magazine and other venues. She holds a PhD in English from Stanford University. She is currently working on her second book, a critical biography of the Chinese diasporic writer Eileen Chang.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Afterlives of the American Renaissance1. Younghill Kang, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Realist Romance2. Carlos Bulosan, Walt Whitman, and the Transnational Jeremiad3. Eileen Chang, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Search for Negative Freedom4. Staging Civil Disobedience with Maxine Hong KingstonConclusion: Tradition and the Asian American SubjectBibliographyIndex

The Asian American Renaissance offers a fascinating account of how Asian American authors have incorporated the ideas, authors and texts of the ‘American Renaissance’ to critique liberalism and explore questions of Asian belonging. Required reading for those interested in nineteenth-century American and Asian American literature.