Wanderwords

Maria Lauret is Reader in American Literature at the University of Sussex, UK, and has also taught in Spain and the United States. Her previous books are Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (1994), Alice Walker (2000, second edition, 2011) and the co-authored Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (2001). She is a founding editor of the journal Atlantic Studies and currently serves on the editorial advisory boards of The European Journal of American Culture and Textual Practice.

• Acknowledgements Chapter 1Beginning Wanderwords: language migration in American literatureChapter 2 How Not to Tame a Wild Tongue: wanderwords in theory Chapter 3 The Promised Land, Lost in Translation: Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman’s wanderwords Chapter 4With and without a Dutch Accent: the life-writing of Edward Bok, Dirk Nieland and Truus van Bruinessen Chapter 5 Richard Rodriguez’s Spanish Chapter 6Fusion Writing: Bharati Mukherjee’s dangerous languages Chapter 7“Words Cast to Weather:” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée Chapter 8Escribir y Leer Bilingually: Spanish/English and Spanglish American literature in the twenty-first century Conclusion Notes Bibliography

Lauret argues that words have ‘immigrated’ into the English of American literature—‘wanderwords’ is her translation of Quintilian's term ‘verba peregrina.’ … The introduction is wide-ranging and cites various terms that might be synonymous, or overlapping. Lauret uses several postmodern literary and linguistic theories to assert how employing other languages is not code-switching but instead multilingual aesthetics that disrupt and shift power structures. Wanderwords starts with early-20th-century authors, then settles on late-20th-century "brown" writers (Richard Rodriguez's term). Interesting, dense, and profoundly nonlinear, the book includes an excellent bibliography and sources. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.