Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater
By (author) Wenying Xu
Publication date:
12 April 2012Length of book:
410 pagesPublisher
Scarecrow PressDimensions:
238x160mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780810855779
Asian American literature is one of the most recent forms of ethnic literature and is already becoming one of the most prominent, given the large number of writers, the growing ethnic population from the region, the general receptivity of this body of work, and the quality of the authors. In recent decades, there has been an exponential growth in their output and much Asian American literature has now achieved new levels of popular success and critical acclaim. Nurtured by rich and long literary traditions from the vast continent of Asia, this literature is poised between the ancient and the modern, between the East and West, and between the oral and the written.
The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater covers the activities in this burgeoning field. First, its history is traced year by year from 1887 to the present, in a chronology, and the introduction provides a good overview. The most important section is the dictionary, with over 600 substantial and cross-referenced entries on authors, books, and genres as well as more general ones describing the historical background, cultural features, techniques and major theatres and clubs. More reading can be found through an extensive bibliography with general works and those on specific authors. The book is thus a good place to get started, or to expanded one’s horizons, about a branch of American literature that can only grow in importance.
The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater covers the activities in this burgeoning field. First, its history is traced year by year from 1887 to the present, in a chronology, and the introduction provides a good overview. The most important section is the dictionary, with over 600 substantial and cross-referenced entries on authors, books, and genres as well as more general ones describing the historical background, cultural features, techniques and major theatres and clubs. More reading can be found through an extensive bibliography with general works and those on specific authors. The book is thus a good place to get started, or to expanded one’s horizons, about a branch of American literature that can only grow in importance.
The Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater is a concise, wide-ranging introduction to a diverse subject area. The work includes more than 600 entries, covering authors, theater groups, genres, major works, terms, subgroups, and historical events. The volume’s impressive coverage of Asian American theater groups and emerging authors of Afghan, Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian descent sets it apart from earlier reference works on Asian American literature. Despite its impressive scope, author Xu notes in the introduction that the volume does not include authors of western Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry. The work is easy to navigate, with many cross-references—names of biographees with their own entries are in boldface type in other entries, making it easy for the reader to note related entries and flip back and forth. A lengthy bibliography at the end of the work provides users with a comprehensive introduction to Asian American literature anthologies as well as literary criticism for more than 60 of the authors covered in the book. This source differs from other recent reference works in Asian American literature, such as Facts On File’s one-volume Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature (2007) and Greenwood’s three-volume Asian American Literature (2009), in its inclusion of Asian American theater and theater groups and in its coverage of Southeast Asian American writers, such as Bryan Thao Worra and Dia Cha (not included in the earlier encyclopedias)....This work is a far-reaching, reasonably priced introduction to the growing field of Asian American literature.