Life in Search of Readers
Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature
Publication Year: 2003
Published by: University of New Mexico Press
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
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pp. vii-
The research and writing of this book have benefited from the following grants and fellowships: A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Award (Yale University), Morse Fellowship (Yale University), Summer Research Support (College of Liberal Arts, Wayne State University), Summer Research Grant (College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan...
Introduction
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pp. 1-7
This book is a reader’s book. Its topic (reading), its author (a reader), and its intended recipients (academic and other interested readers) all point toward this often overlooked but most essential element of literary communication. In the field of Chicano/a literature, not much has been written on readers and readerships to date. The relevant studies on the...
1. Life in Search of Readers: The Quinto Sol Generation and the Creation of a Chicano/a Readership
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pp. 9-39
In this chapter I will analyze the gradual process by which an expanding audience was formed for Chicano/a literature from the nineteenth century until the recent past. My interest is in tracing, very briefly, the information that we have on audience formation belonging to the nineteenth century and early twentieth century and to then concentrate...
2. Characters as Readers and as Writers: A Metaliterary Reflection on the Reading Process
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pp. 41-66
Many Chicano/a novels from the 1970s on (and even some earlier texts) have concerned themselves with characters who become writers. This, in turn, has attracted considerable critical attention as scholars have analyzed the significance of the künstlerroman as a genre in Chicano/a literature.³ Undoubtedly, these characters struggle in their fictional worlds...
3. (En)gendering the Reader: Chicana Literature and Its Implied Audience
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pp. 67-106
Chicana literature is by no means a new phenomenon. As a matter of fact, the oldest-known literary text published by a Mexican American is María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). But it was not until the 1930s and 1940s that Mexican American women started publishing in significant numbers, although many earlier manuscripts are...
4. Querido Reader: Linguistic and Marketing Strategies for Addressing a Multicultural Readership
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pp. 107-138
The previous three chapters have dealt with issues that pertain to a reader-oriented literary history of Chicano/a literature by analyzing some of the most influential books by Chicanos/as in recent decades, as well as by exploring the diachronic problematics of audience formation. With that context in mind, this chapter sets out to accomplish a double...
5. Reading (in) the Past: Textual Recovery and the History of (Reading) Chicano/a Literature
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pp. 139-170
In this final chapter, I intend to address one of the most recent yet dramatic shifts in the history of (reading) Chicano/a literature: the recovery and reprint of forgotten and formerly lost literary works by Chicanos/as, to which my three epigraphs refer. Since the mid-1980s, approximately, numerous scholars have devoted themselves to...
Notes
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pp. 171-203
Works Cited
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pp. 205-221
Index of Names
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pp. 222-227
Index
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pp. 228-232
Back Cover
E-ISBN-13: 9780826333629
E-ISBN-10: 0826333621
Print-ISBN-13: 9780826333605
Print-ISBN-10: 0826333605
Page Count: 240
Publication Year: 2003
