The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature

Routledge contributes another entry to this growing field (see also Asian American Women’s Popular Literature (Thoma, 2014) and Interracial Encounters (Lee, 2011). This Companion is edited by the Associate Professor of English at the University of California Los Angeles, whose research focuses on Asian American literature. Divided into three parts: keywords; geographies, literary ethnoscopes and historical periods; and genre, form and the paraliterary. Although the Introduction is a somewhat too “jargon-rich” for the initiate, it gives important background to and justification for the work.

Instead of brief definitions, the Keywords section offers substantial essays that explore...