Date of Award
1998
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Colby Access Only)
Department
Colby College. American Studies Program
Advisor(s)
Lyn Mikel Brown
Second Advisor
Linda Tatelbaum
Third Advisor
Pamela Thoma
Abstract
As I sat in my advisor's office, next to a large bookshelf filled with poems, literature and critical work by Asian Americans, I asked the question, "Why Amy Tan?" Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) is undoubtedly one of the most popular contemporary novels among a mass American audience and even an academic one. My intrigue with Tan evolved into accounting for why Tan enjoys wide readership while other brilliant Asian American writers are significantly less read by mainstream American audiences. The Joy Luck Club stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months and Tan's work also appears on high school and college syllabi nationwide. Following Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, I have come to label Tan's success the "Amy Tan Phenomenon", which I have sought to demystify by comparing The Joy Luck Club to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975), Myenne Fae Ng's Bone (1993), Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981) and Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (1997).
Keywords
Asian American, Amy Tan Phenomenon, The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan, United States
Recommended Citation
Wildman, Kristin M., "Demystifying the "Amy Tan Phenomenon" - The Contemporary Popularization of Asian American Women's Literature" (1998). Honors Theses. Paper 458.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/458
Copyright
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Comments
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