Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature »

In this important new study, Judith Oster looks at the literature of Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans in relation to each other. Examining what is most at issue for both groups as they live between two cultures, languages, and environments, Oster focuses on the struggles of protagonists to form identities that are necessarily bicultural and always in process. Among the figures Oster considers are writers of autobiographical works like Maxine Hong Kingston and Eva Hoffman and writers of fiction: Amy Tan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Lan Samantha Chang, and Frank Chin.

Author Bio—Judith Oster is Associate Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet and From Reading to Writing: A Rhetoric and Reader.