Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Between Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism

Between Worlds: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and Criticism offers excerpts from novels and short stories by some of the most important and established contemporary writers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rebecca Brown, Ana Castillo, Michelle Cliff, Edwige Danticat, Rikki Ducornet, Louise Erdrich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ha Jin, and Helena María Viramontes. Readers interested in one or more of these authors, and scholars interested in multicultural and transnational literatures, have the opportunity to look more deeply at cultural identity with regard to home, belonging, freedom, history, and memory because the characters embody the hybrid selves that are part and parcel of an often-conflicting world of cultural codes. Migrations, dislocations, displacements, exiles, and relocations are ever more frequently embodied in the world and, thus, through literature. Increased globalization has brought with it greater cultural hybridity and experiential interrogations of singular identity and accepted norms. The characters in Between Worlds embody the increasing number of individuals between worlds. Characters move between countries, between cultures, between languages, and across borders. The literary works included in this anthology, like the human beings and experiences conveyed in these works, cross and re-cross geographical and cultural borders. Close readings of the fiction writers by four contemporary scholars, Catherine Rainwater, Alwin Jones, Belinda Kong, and Lynne Diamond-Nigh, also press readers to examine identity politics, narrowly rendered social or political ideologies, the American Dream, and senses of rootedness or rootlessness on which survival may rely. About the Author Deborah Poe is Assistant Professor of English at Pace University. Her areas of specialization are contemporary American and global fiction, contemporary poetics, and poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. Dr. Poe is the author of three poetry collections The Last Will Be Stone, Too (2013), Elements (2010), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (2008), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (2012). Ama Wattley is Assistant Professor of English at Pace University. She received her PhD from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her areas of specialization are twentieth-century African American and American drama and fiction. She has published essays on fiction writers Toni Morrison and Ann Petry and playwrights August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, Alice Childress, Aishah Rahman, and P. J. Gibson.