The Concept of the American Dream in Maxine Hong Kingston's Chinamen, The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan are very influential contemporary Chinese American authors. As they are labeled as ethnic and feminist writers, former pieces of literary criticism dealing with their novels concentrated mainly on these two approaches. There are also articles and essays dealing with how the characters of these novels create their identity, face cultural differences, and the ambiguous mother-daughter relationships have also been analyzed, but critics tend to focus on these subject matters separately. This thesis focuses on how the American Dream influences the immigrants’ and their children’s minds and psyches in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Chinamen and The Woman Warrior: A Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, as this concept has a crucial part in the conflicts emerging between mothers and daughters and in the process of creating a Chinese American identity.egyetemiangol nyelv és irodalo