Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women's Writing

Despite the surge in publications by Asian American women, relatively little critical work exists which contextualises the history of Asian American women's writing within broader traditions of ethnic American and feminist literatures. This is a study of the development of writing by Asian-American women in the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the successful late 20th-century writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Joy Kogawa, Bharati Mukherjee and Gish Jen. It relates the development of Asian writing by women in America - with a comparative element incorporating Britain - to a series of theoretical preoccupations: the mother/daughter dyad, biracialism, ethnic histories, citizenship, genre and the idea of "home". Grice accounts for the popularity and critical and commercial success of these writers at the start of the third millennium