Asian American Literature Resources

Books

Databases

Web Sites

Authors

Finding books

Use CONSULS, the online catalog, to find books and other materials on your subject. Choose Subject from the CONSULS Main Menu screen and type your subject:

Example: American Literature Asian American Authors

Sample Subject Headings

American Literature Asian American Authors Bibliography

American Literature Asian American Authors Bio Bibliography

American Literature Asian American Authors Bio Bibliography Dictionaries

American Literature Asian American Authors Handbooks Manuals etc.

American Literature Asian American Authors History and Criticism

American Literature Asian American Authors History and Criticism Theory, etc.

To find information on authors type the author's name (last name first). It is not necessary to type the author's full name but it is important to spell correctly.

Example: Tan Amy

A list of SUBJECT HEADINGS will appear in alphabetical order. Select the heading with the author's name or with the author's name and criticism for critical information on the author's works

Example: Tan Amy Criticism and Interpretation

If your search does not have the subdivision you are looking for, choose the subject heading with the most entries. This is usually found in line 1 or 2.

To locate books by author, select Author search and type the author's last name first followed by first name.

Example: Kingston Maxine

To locate a specific book, choose Title and type the title of the book.

Example:  The Joy Luck Club 

You may also do a word search by selecting Keyword:

Example: Tan literary criticism

If there are too many entries, you may limit your search to items available in the SCSU library by selecting the Search SCSU from the menu options under Search All Libraries. You can also limit by year of publication, language, or type of material.

Books pertaining to Asian American literature are usually shelved in the PS section according to the Library of Congress Classification System. Books that have REF before the call number are shelved in the Reference section on the main floor of Buley Library. Circulating books are indicated by SCSU Stacks on CONSULS. Books with call numbers A through N are on the main floor; P through Z are on the second floor.

Selected Books

Anthologies

American dragons: twenty-five Asian American voices

The Big aiiieeeee! an anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American literature

Bold words: a century of Asian American writing

The forbidden stitch: an Asian American women's anthology

Growing up Asian American: an anthology

Humor Me: an anthology of humor by writers of color

Making more waves: new writing by Asian American women

Speaking for ourselves: American ethnic writing

Voices of multicultural America: notable speeches delivered by African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native Americans, 1790-1995

Background/History

The Asian American: the historical experience

Asian American dreams: the emergence of an American people

Asian American experience in the United states

Asian American literature: an introduction to the writings and their social contexts

Asian American psychology: the science of lives in context

Asian/Pacific Islander American women: a historical anthology

Chinese American literature since the 1850s

Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and racial anxiety in the United States, 1848-82

The Chinese in America: a history from Gold Mountain to the new millenium

The Columbia documentary history of the Asian American experience

The Columbia guide to Asian American history

Hmong and American: stories of transition to a strange land

India: a global studies handbook

Not just victims: conversations with Cambodian community leaders in the United States

Pacific pioneers: Japanese journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80

Racism, dissent, and Asian Americans from 1850 to the present: a documentary history

The second generation: ethnic identity among Asian Americans

The sum of our parts: mixed heritage Asian Americans

Bibliographies/Biographies

Asian American autobiographers: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook

Asian American literature: an annotated bibliography

Asian American novelists: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook 

Asian American playwrights: a bio-bibliographical critical sourcebook

Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook

Asian American Short Story Writers

Asian American Writers (Dictionary of Literary Biography, V. 312)

Asian American Writers

Criticism

America's Asia: racial form and American literature, 1893-1945

An interethnic companion to Asian American Literature

Articulate silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa

Asian American literary studies

Asian American Literature: Reviews and Criticism of Works by American Writers of Asian Descent

Asian American literature in the international context: readings on fiction, poetry and performance

The Asian Pacific American heritage: a companion to literature and the arts

Assimilating Asians: gendered strategies of authorship in Asian America

Consumption and identity in Asian American coming-of-age novels

Critical essays: gay and lesbian writers of color

Double agency: acts of impersonation in Asian American literature and culture

Imagining the nation: Asian American Literature and cultural consent

The immigrant experience in North American literature

The imperialist imaginary: visions of Asia and the Pacific in American culture

Into the fire: Asian American prose

Literary gestures: the aesthetic in Asian American writing

The melancholy of race

Minor re/visions: Asian American literacy narratives as a rhetoric of citizenship

Mixed race literature

Multicultural American literature: comparative black, native, latino/a and Asian American fictions

National abjection: the Asian American body on stage

Narratives for a new belonging: diasporic cultural fictions

New strangers in paradise: the immigrant experience and contemporary American fiction

The politics of the visible in Asian North American narratives

Postcolonial theory and the United States: race, ethnicity and literature

Race and resistance: literature and politics in Asian America

Racial castration: managing masculinity in Asian America

Reading Asian American Literature: from necessity to extravagance

Reading the literatures of Asian America

Recovered legacies: authority and identity in early Asian American literature

Sexual naturalization: Asian Americans and miscegenation

The shapes and styles of Asian American prose fiction

Transcultural reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian short story cycles

Transnational Asian American literature: sites and transits

The world next door: South Asian American literature and the idea of America

Writing manhood in black and yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the literary politics of identity

Dictionaries/Handbooks/Encyclopedias

The Continuum encyclopedia of children's literature

Dictionary of Asian American history

Encyclopedia of Modern Asia

The Greenwood encyclopedia of multiethnic American literature

Handbook of Asian American psychology

Fiction

American eyes: new Asian American short stories for young adults

Charlie Chan is dead: an anthology of contemporary Asian American fiction

Good fortune: my journey to Gold Mountain

Home to stay: Asian American women's fiction

Yell-oh girls!: emerging voices explore culture, identity, and growing up Asian American

A concise companion to postwar American literature and culture

Guides

The Columbia companion to the twentieth-century American short story

The Columbia Guide to Asian American Literature since 1945

Multicultural writers since 1945: an A to Z guide

A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature

Plays/Performance/Theater

But still, like air, I'll rise: new Asian American plays

Contemporary American ethnic poets: lives, works, sources

Playwrights of color

Performing Asian America: race and ethnicity on the contemporary stage

The politics of life: four plays by Asian American women

Unbroken thread: an anthology of plays by Asian American women

Poems/Poetry

Breaking silence: an anthology of contemporary Asian American poets

Contemporary American ethnic poets: lives, works, sources

The ethics and poetics of alterity in Asian American poetry

The open boat: poems from Asian America

Quiet fire: A historical anthology of Asian American poetry, 1892-1970

Women/Women Authors

Amy Tan: a critical companion

Asian American Women Writers

Betrayal and other acts of subversion: feminism, sexual politics, Asian American women's literature

Between worlds: women writers of Chinese ancestry

Critical essays on Maxine Hong Kingston

Filthy fictions: Asian American literature by women

In her mother's house: the politics of Asian-American mother daughter-writing

Maxine Hong Kingston: a critical companion

Modeling minority women: heroines in African and Asian American fiction

Onoto Watanna: the story of Winnifred Eaton

Our feet walk the sky: women of the South Asian diaspora

Paradoxes of postcolonial culture: contemporary women writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian diaspora

Tell this silence: Asian American women writers and the politics of speech

Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: a literary biography

Databases

Academic Search Premier
EBSCOHost's Academic Search Premier indexes magazine and journal articles, many of which are available full text. Over 300 literary journals are indexed. It is possible to search for peer-reviewed journal articles or for those that contain the full text of the article. It is also possible to search for articles from specific journals.

Asian American Drama
Asian American Drama brings together more than 250 plays, along with related biographical, production, and theatrical information, thus providing a comprehensive overview of this growing field.  The collection begins with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and it is planned to include contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga. Asian American Drama represents the various ethnicities within the Asian American community. Along with many works by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent, the collection includes plays by writers of Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian, and Malaysian ancestry.

Digital Dissertations
Digital Dissertations provides more than 2 million entries to doctoral dissertations and masters' theses. More than 600,000 are available in native or PDF formats for immediate free download. Coverage 1861-current.

Essay and General Literature Index
An index to essays that appear in collections focusing on the social sciences and the humanities.

Expanded Academic Index (ASAP)
Periodicals covering all academic concentrations.

Gale's Literature Resource Center
Full-text author biographies, critical essays, and more drawn from several Gale resources, including Contemporary Authors, the Dictionary of Literary Biography and the Literary Criticism sets.

GenderWatch
This is a full-text collection of international journals, magazines, newsletters, regional publications, special reports and conference proceedings devoted to women's and gender issues. Information on women authors and their books can be found here.

Granger's World of Poetry Online
Contains poetry citations, poems in full text, scholarly commentary on poems and poets, biographical and bibliographical information and a glossary of poetic terms.

Humanities International Complete
Covers journals, books and other sources in the humanities. Indexes and abstracts over 1,700 journals.

General OneFile
For college students. Indexes and abstracts magazines and journals on all topics, with many articles available in full text.

JSTOR
Full-text access to back issues of scholarly journals in all fields.

Literary Reference Center (Ebsco)
Provides a broad spectrum of information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and time periods. LRC combines information from major reference works, books, literary journals, and more. Some articles available in full-text.

Literature Online (LION)
LION is a fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, 136 full-text literature journals, and other key criticism and reference resources.

MLA International Bibliography
This is the primary database for literary research and indexes scholarly articles in literary journals, books and dissertations. Covers literature, language, linguistics and folklore. Check CONSULS to see if we own the publication cited.

New York Times Historical Archives
Contains the full-text of New York Times from 1851-to 2001 (rolling window).

Project Muse
Contains full text of scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences and mathematics.

Wilson Select Plus
Indexes/abstracts articles in the humanities, including philosophy, folklore, linguistics, archeology, film, religion, and literature. Includes film and book reviews.

Web Resources

Asian American Authors

Contains links to a list of works by Asian American authors compiled by the librarians of the Harold Washington Library Center and to the Asian Americans Writers' Workshop. The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans. There are links to works by Asian American writers for young adults as well as to individual authors like Gish Jen, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amy Tan, and Gus Lee.

Asian American Literature
A course page on Asian American Literature with several useful links to related websites including the online journals Darpan and Anagram.

Asian American Literature: History, Classroom Use, Bibliography and WWW Resources
Contains an introduction to Asian American literature, the history of the genre, links to reviews of works by Amy Tan and Laurence Yep among others andbibliography of general reference sources, magazine articles, anthologies, traditional/folk literature, fiction, non-fiction, biography and movies.

Asian American Literature: A Selective Bibliography
This bibliography represents primarily fiction written by Asian American writers and is divided into two parts: pre 1950 and post 1950 literature. The first part reflects the history of Asian immigration patterns to the US and the second reflects the growth of Asian American communities.

Asian American Literature: Sources for Research
This site contains refereed journals, suggested scholarly books, Asian American bookstores and publishers, Asian American Studies programs, and non-academic
sites dealing with Asian American issues.

Asian American Literature/Writers
This site contains an excellent bibliography which was made possible by a grant from California Arts Council and friends. The bibliography lists
collections/anthologies, books about Asian American literature, books about or interviews with Asian American writers, and links to a long list of Asian American writers and their works.

Asian American Writers
Contains brief biographies of noted Asian American writers and links to articles, interviews and book reviews.

Filipino American Literature
This page from Emory University gives a brief description of Filipino American literature highlighting the major themes and works of fiction and poetry with links to related sites.

South Asian Women Writers
This site is sponsored by SAWNET (South Asian Women's Network), a forum for and about women from Bangla Desh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The bookshelf section features new books, reviews of fiction, anthologies, poetry, non-fiction, cookbooks, authors, bookclubs, magazines, and links to bookstores.

Voice of the Shuttle - Asian American Writers
Voice of the Shuttle is an excellent site for information on minority literatures. The section on Asian Pacific American literatures includes general resources in Asian American literature, resources for K-12 teachers, and links to Asian American Writers broken down by Asian American Women Writers of Color, Asian American Autobiography, authors by name and by racial/ethnic background with links to Chinese American, Filipina American, Indian American, Japanese American, and Korean American.

Authors 

Afghani Americans

Khaled Hosseini

Bangla Deshi Americans

Tahmima Anam
Himani Bannerji

Cambodian Americans

Chanrithy Him
Haing S. Ngor
Dith Pran
Loung Ung

Chinese Americans

Diana Chang
Iris Chang
Lan Samantha Chang
Frank Chin
Edith Maude Eaton
Winnifred Eaton
David Henry Hwang
Gish Jen
Maxine Hong Kingston
Gus Lee
Amy Ling
Aimee E. Liu
Fae Myenne Ng
Amy Tan
Elizabeth Wong
Jade Snow Wong
Nellie Wong
Shawn Wong
John Yau
Chiang Yee
Lawrence Yep
Lin Yutang

Filipino Americans

Peter Bacho
Jeannie Barroga
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
Carlos Bulosan
Nick Carbo
Linda Ty-Casper
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn
Han Ong
Bienvenido N. Santos
Jose Garcia Villa

Indian Americans

Meena Alexander
Agha Shahid Ali
Anita Rau Badami
G.S. Sharat Chandra
Brinda Charry
Anita Desai
Kiran Desai
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Indira Ganesan
Amitav Ghosh
Jhumpa Lahiri
Suketu Mehta
Ved Mehta
Rohinton Mistry
Shani Mootoo
Bharati Mukherjee
Kirin Narayan
Uma Parameswaran
Raja Rao
Arudhati Roy
Vikram Seth
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Indu Sundaresan
Manil Suri
Shashi Tharoor
Sudhir Venkatesh

Japanese Americans

Philip Kan Gotanda
Kyoko Mori
Toshio Mori
David Mura
Milton Murayama
John Okada
Dwight Okita
William Hosokawa
Kazuo Ishiguro
Joy Kogawa
Yoshiko Uchida
Hisaye Yamamoto
Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Wakako Yamauchi

Korean Americans

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Susan Choi
Richard E. Kim
Chang Rae Lee
Don Lee
Diana Son
Cathy Song
Mia Yun

Malaysian Americans

Lawrence Chua
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim

Pakistani Americans

Talat Abbasi
Bapsi Sidhwa

Sri Lankan Americans

Michael Ondaatje 
Shyam Selvadurai

Vietnamese Americans

Le Ly Hayslip
Le Thi Diem Thuy
Linh Dinh
Nguyen Chi Thien

Winnie Shyam

Reference Librarian