This book engages the critical mode of cosmopolitanism through racial discourse in the work of several major twentieth-century African American authors, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes and Albert Murray.

Negotiating Identities 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'.

Definitions of modernism have been debated throughout the twentieth century. But both during the height of the modernist era and since, little to no consideration has been given to the work of minority writers as part of this movement. Considering works by writers ranging from B.A. Botkin, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Frank, and Jean Toomer to Pedro Pietri and Allen Ginsberg, these essays examine the disputed relationships between modernity, modernism, and American cultural diversity. In so doing, the collection as a whole adds an important new dimension to our understanding of twentieth-century literature.

Narrative, gender, and history in Winesburg, Ohio -- Sherwood Anderson and primitivism -- Double dealing in the South : Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, and the ethnography of region -- "Things are so immediate in Georgia": articulating the South in Cane -- Cane, body technologies, and genealogy -- Cane, audience, and form.

This book charts the significant changes in contemporary Canada's literary profile since the mid-1990s, within a context of the new national rhetoric of multiculturalism. By looking closely at a representative range of fictions in English by women from a variety of ethnocultural backgrounds, Howells examines the complexities embedded within Canadian identity. What does 'Refiguring Identities' mean for these writers, given their individual agendas and the multiple affiliation of any woman's identity construction? All these writers are engaged in rewriting history across generation, and Howells argues that woman's fiction negotiates new possibilities for cultural change, introducing more heterogeneous narratives of identity in multi-cultural Canada.