Modern Minority Asian American Literature and Everyday Life

Modern Minoritypresents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature's relationship to the genre of realism, particularly through its preoccupation with the everyday. Lee argues that it is through the elements of the everyday, which she defines as the 'quantifiable' attention to familiar objects and 'quasi-statistical' repetitions of ordinary acts, that Asian American writers negotiate their vexed relationship to modernity. Lee draws on Lukacs, Jameson, de Certeau, and other cultural critics to show how portraits of the everyday articulate Asian American writers' participation in the project of literary realism. The study participates in a new trend in Asian American criticism that sees form as crucial to the construction of minorness. The book covers most of the 20th century and spans a range of Asian ethnic groups and literary styles. Authors examined include Carlos Bulosan, Lan Samantha Chang, Frank Chin, Ha Jin, Younghill Kang, Nora Okja Keller, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Chang-rae Lee, Mine Okubo, Monica Sone, Jade Snow Wong, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jhumpa Lahiri, Thi Diem Thy L, and Toshio Mori. The manuscript contributes a new direction in a field in which the criticism has been preoccupied with the politics of recognition and identity; it will interest scholars in Asian American, ethnic American, and American literary and cultural criticism.

Yoon Sun Lee is Professor of English at Wellesley College. She is the author of Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle.