Space, *form, and tradition: Recontextualizing the contemporary ethnic-American novel.

摘要

This dissertation documents the rise of the twentieth-century ethnic American novel by tracing the under-recognized relationship between recent multicultural fiction and its literary antecedents, immigrant and African-American texts of the first half of the twentieth century. In advancing this cross-cultural, cross-temporal contextual reorientation, I establish thematic and stylistic ties between both periods and propose that the body of ethnic literature in the United States revolutionizes the novel as a form.;My methodology builds primarily upon feminist, postcolonial, and African-American theory and criticism. The theoretical core of this project is Houston Baker's and Henry Louis Gates' positioning of tropes as sites of inquiry into the ideological and aesthetic factors that shape a tradition. While drawing on a wide range of texts, my argument centers mainly on the following: John Edgar Wideman's Sent for You Yesterday and the black urban tradition, Toni Morrison's Beloved and domestic discourse, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and postmodern interstitiality, and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban and the journey narrative.