Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives
Winner of the 2021 Midwest Modern Language Association Book Award
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 the 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 and memoir 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.
ISBN: 978-1609387631
Now through July 13, 2023, you may order Novel Subjects from the University of Iowa Press website using the discount code, NOVEL40.
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Request that your university library purchase a copy of the book: Look on your library website for a section with a name such as “Recommend Library Materials” or “Suggest a Title for Purchase.” (Oftentimes, this is located on the Contact Us page.)
Now through July 13, 2023, you may order Novel Subjects from the University of Iowa Press website using the discount code, NOVEL40.
For more publications by Leah Milne, click here.
Media
The #USSOBookHour event on Novel Subjects was recorded, and can be viewed here.
I gave a book talk on Novel Subjects for the Circle of Asian American Literary Studies. You can find a summary here!