Werner Sollors Reader

Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and of African American Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of several volumes on race and ethnicity including Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986), Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997) and Ethnic Modernism (2008). Daniel G. Williams is Professor of English Literature at Swansea University and author of Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois (2006), Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945 (2012) and Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (2015).

Williams’s Reader does not provide access to all of Sollors’s contributions, but it is an excellent primer. It does all one could ask a volume of 468 pages to do for so capacious a body of scholarly work. No writer of the last half-century has done as much as Werner Sollors to illuminate the history of American diversity.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Schwarz, Braun, und Beige:: Towards Cosmopolitan Particularism Daniel G. WilliamsPart I. Terms and Definitions1. The Invention of Ethnicity2. Race and EthnicityPart II. American LiteratureOverviews3. Between Consent and Descent: Studying Ethnic Literature in the USA4. Typology and Ethnogenesis5. Ethnic ModernismReadings6. Edward Taylor7. Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson 8. Hemingway and American Style9. Richard Rodriguez’s Autobiographical WritingPart III. African American LiteratureOverview10. The Wright Era: Native Son and the African American NovelReadings11. Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition12. Adrienne Kennedy and Tragedy13. Teju Cole’s Open City and CosmopolitanismPart IV. Jewish American LiteratureOverview14. Assimilation and Dissimilation in Jewish American Prose Writing, 1900-1950Readings15. Mary Antin’s The Promised Land 16. Henry Roth’s Call It SleepPart V. MultilingualismOverview17. The Blind Spot of Multiculturalism: America’s Invisible LiteratureReadings18. Non-English American Short Stories19. German-Language Literature about the United States, and German-American WritingPart VI. InterracialismOverview20. Can Rabbits Have Interracial Sex?Readings21. The Curse of Ham22. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings23. Incest and MiscegenationPart VII. World War II and after in Germany Overview24. Before SuccessReadings25. “Better to Die by Them than for Them”: Carl Schmitt Reads “Benito Cereno”26. “Everybody Gets Fragebogened Sooner or Later”: The Denazification Questionnaire as Cultural Text27. A Child at Bergen-Belsen: A Photograph from 1945Index