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Agriculture and Asian American Literature
Sarah D. Wald
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Anzaldúa, Gloria
Betsy Dahms
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Asian American Literary Reception and Readership
Tamara Bhalla
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Asian Diasporic Narratives of Return
Patricia P. Chu
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Australian Travel Writing, 1900–1960
Anna Johnston
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Australian Women’s Writing in Mid-Century Modernity
Susan Sheridan
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Autofiction
Hywel Dix
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Bildungsroman
Anne Rüggemeier
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Carl Schmitt’s Literary Criticism
Peter Uwe Hohendahl
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Chinese Workers’ Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Paola Iovene and Federico Picerni
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The Cold War and Asian American Literature
Heidi Kim
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Contemporary Latinx Literature in the Midwest
Theresa Delgadillo and Leila Vieira
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Cuban American Literatures
Ricardo L. Ortiz
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Díaz, Junot
Yomaira C. Figueroa
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Gay Literature: Poetry and Prose
Edward Halsey Foster
Queer theory, a subject of much controversy among academics and literary critics in recent decades, raises crucial questions regarding the reception and creation of literary texts. Advocates of queer theory claim that both heterosexuality and homosexuality are socially constructed and that there is nothing “natural” about any sexual identity. Literary works traditionally seen as expressions of their authors' feeling or presence, as is the case with lyric poems, must now be reconceived as political discourse. The individual and his or her writings are no longer considered to be “essentially” gay or straight but instead are components in a broad political discourse. Queer theory is by no means universally accepted—its critics include such well-known scholars as Rictor Norton (b. 1945) and the best-selling author Camille Paglia (b. 1947)—but the vast majority of academic literary studies of gay writers follow its dictates.