"Originally published serially in the Norwegian-language newspaper Decorah Posten in the 1920s, The Rise of Jonas Olsen illustrates an immigrant's struggle to preserve his identity and heritage while striving to become fully accepted as an American."--BOOK JACKET.

Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the periodicals and communities in which they circulated. With essays on serial fiction published from the 1820s through the 1960s written in ten different languages—English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Yiddish, and Chinese—this collection reflects the rich multilingual history of American literature and periodicals. One of this book’s central claims is that this serial fiction was produced and read within an intensely transnational context: the periodicals often circulated widely, the narratives themselves favored transnational plots and themes, and the contents surrounding the fiction encouraged readers to identify with a community dispersed throughout the United States and often the world. Thus, Okker focuses on the circulation of ideas, periodicals, literary conventions, and people across various borders, focusing particularly on the ways that this fiction reflects the larger transnational realities of these minority communities.

Haunting and revealing photographs sent home by Norwegian immigrants in America as visual document and collective expression of the emigrant experience Between 1836 and 1915, in what has been called history’s largest population migration, more than 750,000 Norwegians emigrated to North America. Writing home, the newcomers sent thousands of pictures—America–photographs, as they are called in Norway. In these photographs, the emigrant experience unfolds as framed by thousands of Norwegian transplants in towns, cities, and rural communities across America. Pictures of Longing brings more than 250 America–photographs into focus as a moving account of Norwegian migration in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, conceived of and crafted by its photographer-authors to shape and reshape their story. To clarify the historic nature and the cultural function of the America-photographs, art historian and photography scholar Sigrid Lien located thousands of the photographs in public and private archives and museums in Norway and the United States. Reading these photographs alongside letters sent home by Norwegian immigrants, Lien provides the first comprehensive account of this collective photographic practice involving “the voice of the many.” Pictures of Longing shows, in fascinating detail, how the photographs, like the accompanying letters, contribute to the cultural grassroots expression of Norwegian migration. They steer us toward multiple, fragmented, and dispersed histories and also complement the existing fabric of established historical narratives, demonstrating photography’s potential to engage with history.

The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America is a history of American literature. It is different from other histories of American literature in that the language of the writers and their readers was not English. There have been studies of American authors who have used languages such as French, German, Spanish, or Swedish, but this is the first comprehensive history of any literature written and read in the United States in another language than English. Indeed, most histories of American literature are based on the theory that English is the only American literary language. Such a theory, however, dismisses the fact that English has in periods been a minority language in many areas. In this book American literature is the literature of people who are American by choice or by birth regardless of the language they may have used. This book demonstrates that Norwegian has indeed been an American literary language and that many of the American writers in this language deserve our attention.

The Midwest has produced a robust literary heritage. Its authors have won half of the nation's Nobel Prizes for Literature plus a significant number of Pulitzer Prizes. This volume explores the rich racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the region. It also contains entries on 35 pivotal Midwestern literary works, literary genres, literary, cultural, historical, and social movements, state and city literatures, literary journals and magazines, as well as entries on science fiction, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and environmental writing. Prepared by a team of scholars, this second volume of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature is a comprehensive resource that demonstrates the Midwest's continuing cultural vitality and the stature and distinctiveness of its literature.

Werner Sollors's monograph looks into how African American, European immigrant and other minority writers gave the United States its increasingly multicultural self-awareness, focusing on their use of the strategies opened up by modernism.

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world’s fairs as transnational sites of memory.