Ebook: Beyond Literary Chinatown

The phenomenon of "literary Chinatown"—the ghettoization of Chinese American literature—was produced by the same dynamics of race and representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into literal Chinatowns. Jeffrey F. L. Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to these expectations posed by recent Chinese American texts, challenges that push our understanding of a multicultural society to new horizons. Partridge builds on the concept of a “reading horizon”—a set of expectations and assumptions that a reader brings to a text—to explore the crucial interplay between reader, author, and text. Arguing that authors like Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Shawn Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and David Wong Louie are aware of their readers' horizons and write to challenge those assumptions, Partridge demonstrates how their writings function as a potent medium of cultural transformation.