Introduction: Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850–1930

Summary

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century represent a unique challenge to Asian North American literary scholars. Given the various obstacles that immigrants from Asia had to overcome in order to enter the United States, the political oppression, economic hardships, and social ostracism they endured when they arrived, and the xenophobic expectations of a publishing industry and reading public eager to proliferate stories of the “yellow peril,” it is easy to understand why fewer Asian-authored literary texts were published in the United States and Canada during this time and, perhaps, easy to dismiss these years as relatively unimportant to Asian American literary history.