Interweaving introspection with political commentaries, biography with history, The Promised Land (1912) brings to life the transformation of an East European Jewish immigrant into an American citizen. Mary Antin recounts "the process of uprooting, transportation, replanting, acclimitization, and de[...]
This book looks at the role of 'ethnicity' in American literature and what that literature has said - and continues to say - about the diverse American culture. Discussing works from every period of American history, Sollors focuses particularly on the tension between 'descent' and 'consent' - betwe[...]
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along - a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and [...]
These essays chart the cultural constraints of 'ethnicity' in American history and culture. Sollors' introductory essay sets the framework for the discussion of ethnicity and the individual essays cover a wide range of topics: Native American, Latin-American, historical Jewish, nineteenth-century A[...]
Equiano's autobiography tells the story of his life before, during and after enslavement, and is considered to have established the slave narrative as a new literary genre. Born in a village in West Africa, Equiano was captured and enslaved at the age of 11, taken to the West Indies and sold to a Vi[...]
An 1830s African-American slave narrative written in Arabic. Dafydd Morgan, the only American immigrant novel published in Welsh. The Native American epic, Walum Olum, in the Lenape language. Theodor Adorno's dream transcripts, in German. A short story about the politics of abortion in working-class[...]