Sumario: | Popular genre fiction written by Asian American women and featuring Asian American characters gained a market presence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These ?crossover? books{u2014}mother-daughter narratives, chick lit, detective fiction, and food writing{u2014}attempt to bridge ethnic audiences and a broader reading public. In Asian American Women's Popular Literature, Pamela Thoma considers how these books both depict contemporary American-ness and contribute critically to public dialogue about national belonging. Novels such as Michelle Yu and Blossom Kan{u2019}s China Dolls and Sonia Singh{u2019}s Goddess for Hire, or mysteries including Sujata Massey{u2019}s Girl in a Box and Suki Kim{u2019}s The Interpreter, reveal Asian American women{u2019}s ambivalence about the trappings and prescriptions of mainstream American society. Thoma shows how these writers{u2019} works address the various pressures on women to manage their roles in relation to family and finances{u2014}reconciling the demands of work, consumer culture, and motherhood{u2014}in a neoliberal society. --Amazon.com.
|