Novel Subjects

Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives

Leah A. Milne

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781609387624
• eBook ISBN: 9781609387631
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How does contemporary literature contend with the power and responsibility of authorship, particularly when considering marginalized groups? How have the works of multiethnic authors challenged the notion that writing and authorship are neutral or universal?

In Novel Subjects, Leah Milne offers a new way to look at multicultural literature by focusing on scenes of writing in contemporary works by authors with marginalized identities. These scenes, she argues, establish authorship as a form of radical self-care—a term we owe to Audre Lorde, who defines self-care as self-preservation and "an act of political warfare."

In engaging in this battle, the works discussed in this study confront limitations on ethnicity and nationality wrought by the institutionalization of multiculturalism. They also focus on identities whose mere presence on the cultural landscape is often perceived as vindictive or willful. Analyzing recent texts by Carmen Maria Machado, Louise Erdrich, Ruth Ozeki, Toni Morrison, and more, Milne connects works across cultures and nationalities in search of reasons for this recent trend of depicting writers as characters in multicultural texts. Her exploration uncovers fiction that embrace unacceptable or marginalized modes of storytelling—such as plagiarism, historical revisions, jokes, and lies—as well as inauthentic, invisible, and unexceptional subjects. These works ultimately reveal a shared goal of expanding the borders of belonging in ethnic and cultural groups, and thus add to the ever-evolving conversations surrounding both multicultural literature and self-care.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Vindictively American
• 1. Novel Subjects and Objectionable Authorship: Gina Apostol and Louise Erdrich
• 2. Against “Authenticity”—Writing the Self and the Other: Carmen Maria Machado and Jonathan Safran Foer
• 3. Material Metafiction and the Life-Changing Magic of All Myriad Things: Nicole Krauss and Ruth Ozeki
• 4. “A Blank Page Rises Up”: Willful Authors in Percival Everett’s Percival Everett by Virgil Russell and Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado
• Epilogue: Releasing Doubles into the World . . .
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List