What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always fit easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly "fit" female writers into the "white male" scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, including Mary Rowlandson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Frances Harper, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich, discussing how the present classification of these writers by periods affects our reading of their work. Beyond the focus of feminist challenges to American literary periodization, this volume also studies issues of a need for literary reforms considering differences in race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The essays are valuable and informative as individual critical studies of specific writers and their works. Challenging Boundaries presents intelligent, original, well-written, and practical arguments in support of long-awaited changes in American literary scholarship and is a milestone of feminist literary study.

Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1945, The Frontiers of Love passes effortlessly in and out of Asian and Western fields of reference to explore the issue of cultural identity in a city dominated by Western colonialism. Diana Chang uses psychological portrayal, historical narrative, and sociological observation to achieve a multi-dimensional view of a city both Chinese and Western, liberating and oppressive, national and international. As the character Feng observes of Shanghai, "Strictly speaking, it could not be called Chinese, though it was inhabited mostly by Chinese - Chinese who were either wealthy, Westernized, or prayed to a Christian God".

In this critically acclaimed memoir, Lim lays bare the turns in her early life in wartorn Malaysia, from wealth and security to poverty and family violence. Her struggles to fashion a meaningful life that will include professional achievement and a self-determined sexuality take her on a journey across cultural and geographical borders. In time, she moves from a numbered isolation to a self-forged identity as an Asian American, aware of her relationship to the land she left behind, her new homeland, and the homeland she carries within herself.

Walking Backwards is about making a home when you are a nomad, and adding an American self to the many selves that the world's myriad, bewildering places throw at one body. It is about how travel and restlessness wrench us and teach us about ourselves, how our losses compound our loves, and how endlessly absorbing the idea of home remains, particularly when we keep losing sight of it. Orbiting the globe, this collection narrates encounters in a transnational American's circuit. As much about Hong Kong as the west coast of the United States, it bundles transients and family, nature and city, the still point within and characters everywhere, to produce a fresh, ethnically inflected poetics.

The stories of Shirley Geok-lin Lim reflect the complex mosaic of her world and of her own personal journey as a woman and an Asian American. The setting of these sometimes wryly funny, sometimes heartbreaking stories, shifts from the war-torn, tradition-bound Malaysia of Lim's childhood to the liberating but confusing and often harsh United States of her childhood. Her memory is undiluted by nostalgia, her ear is perfectly tuned to the voices of both her old country and her new, and her eye is sharp to the special dilemmas faced by girls and women. Shirley Lim captures, as few writers have, the poignant and perplexing experience of immigrant women, who, torn between two cultures, must build their own values and their own homelands from within.

Two Dreams draws together the best of Lim's short fiction from nearly three decades, most of it never before available in the United States, and includes important new work. In the new story "Sisters," Su Swee Wing finds escape from her overbearing, traditional father by excelling in school and applying to college in the United States, while the older sister she adores-the fearless, wise-cracking, "no-good" Yen-is pushed into an arranged marriage. "Hunger" is the painfully vivid story of a girl, abandoned by her mother, who is literally starving for lack of attention and love, but hides her hunger from the world because she is ashamed. In the title story, a young woman emigre dreams through the cold New York winter of her hometown in Malaysia, "of the warm salty sea of her childhood, like emryonic fluid...to which she returned in her sleep." But when she visits Malaysia, her dreams reveal that she is no longer at home in the land of her birth.

Much of the drama of Lim's stories is played out in the "in-between" spaces where differences meet: old values and new, Asia and America, parents and children, men and women. Thsi terrain is fraught with ambivalence and thus with danger-but also with possibility. Lim has explored this territory throughout her writing life; among her mementos are the haunting, corrageously original stories of Two Dreams.