Literature and Culture

Literature and Culture 

Anton Pokrivčák et al.

LITERATURE AND CULTURE 

Anton Pokrivčák et al. 

Nitra 

2010 

4

Authors: 

Anton Pokrivčák 

Simona Hevešiová 

Alena Smiešková 

Mária Kiššová 

Emília Janecová 

Reviewers: 

Doc. PaedDr. Silvia Pokrivčáková, PhD. 

Doc. PhDr. Jaroslav Kušnír, PhD. 

This publication is funded from the project KEGA 3/6467/08 Vyučovanie 

interkultúrneho povedomia cez literatúru a kultúrne štúdiá (Teaching Intercultural 

Awareness through Literature and Cultural Studies). 

© Anton Pokrivčák et al. 

ISBN 978-80-8094-790-3 

EAN 9788080947903 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Introduction 7 

Multiculturalism, Transcendentalism, and the Fate of 

American Literature 


American Urban Landscape – the Progress that does not 

Move 


Literature and Culture: the British Perspective 


The Immigrant Experience and its Representation in 

Literature 


Culture and Children´s Literature 


9 

34 

42 

61 

86 

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Introduction 

There is no doubt that one of the most important issues challenging the 

world in recent times is the issue of culture – in all its varied manifestations. 

There is almost no aspect of our reality in which we are not confronted with 

the effect of the cultural - the human, social, and even natural sciences being 

no exception to this. While on the one hand we can see that cultural 

differences may become a source of innumerable conflicts (including the 

most violent ones), on the other hand, they can also evoke the need for the 

overcoming of these differences through globalisation, or to present an 

appreciation of individual cultures through the policy of multiculturalism. In 

literary studies the cultural seems to take on the form of the latter, i.e. the 

struggle for multicultural representation on all levels of the literary process – 

a text´s production, structure, and reception. 

The essays in this book focus on the analysis of the connection between 

literature and culture in American and English literature. They begin with my 

own discussion of the effect of cultural studies on literary studies in American 

literature, and of the role and legacy of transcendentalism for the future 

development of American literature and culture. The next essay is Alena 

Smiešková´s treatment of some of DeLillo´s and Auster´s novels in the 

context of her reflections concerning modernist and postmodern approaches 

to space. Simona Hevešiová and Emília Janecová explore cultural and ethnic 

literature in Great Britain and provide insightful analyses of several new 

works by ethnic writers. Mária Kiššová´s essay links the cultural studies 

approach to a discussion of literature for children and young adults. Besides 

the attention placed upon the general observations in the field, part of her 

work also examines methodological issues, especially the use of multicultural 

literature in the classroom. 

This book is our joint attempt to reflect upon current tendencies in literary 

studies in a complex way, exploring both new potentialities for the 

interpretation of literary works as well as pointing out certain drawbacks and 

dangers. 


7

Multiculturalism, Transcendentalism, and the Fate 

of American Literature 


The predominance of cultural considerations occurring in much of the 

current criticism in American literature is no surprise at all, since the 

literature which originated on the territory of the United States of America 

significantly differs from traditional European literatures. The difference lies 

especially in the fact that while European literatures have grown out of 

linguistically and ethnically homogeneous sources, the literatures of the 

United States have always been a product of several cultures speaking 

various languages. The extent of its heterogeneous make-up allows one to 

ask the most natural question: “How can America, or its literature, and from 

the Puritans to the postmodern, in any accurate sense ever have been 

thought other than multicultural?” (Lee, p. 1). Who could doubt it, Lee goes 

on to ask, and provides the following answer: “not a few. For whether as a 

history, or for more immediate purposes a line of authorship, America, long, 

and almost by automatic custom, has been projected as a mainstream 

nothing if not overwhelmingly Eurocentric, Atlantic, east to west, and whitemale 

in its unfolding” (p. 1). However, in the second part of the twentieth 

century, this long history of “mainstream” interpretation, accompanied by 

the growing awareness of America´s multicultural nature, resulted in the rise 

of ethnic literature and literary studies consciously struggling against the 

Eurocentric conception of American literature. 1 

Both tendencies testify to the fact that culture, in the current use of the 

term as ethnicity, is one of the most important aspects of literature against 

which literary values are discussed, and that it is a very complex and sensitive 

phenomenon which has to be approached carefully, since it has a potential 

either to enhance receptiveness to democracy and its values, including 

literary values, or to damage the sense of sharing one destiny, of belonging 

together. Gregory S. Jay is definitely very well aware of this when he asks: 

“Aren´t there dangers as well as values in multiculturalism?” (1991, p. 48). He 

1 Some scholars claim that, nowadays, we could speak of the end of “American” literature, 

which should be substituted for “writing in the USA” (Jay, 1991). 

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confirms the complexity of the concept by pointing to Diane Ravitch´s 

distinction between a proper and a dangerous multiculturalism, when she 

argues that “a proper multiculturalism teaches respect for the diversity of 

America´s ‘common culture’ (and so is pluralistic), while a dangerous 

multiculturalism advocates conflicting ethnocentrisms and implies that ‘no 

common culture is possible or desirable’ (and so is particularistic)” (Jay, 1991, 

p. 48). However, Jay suggests that the term “common culture” in the case of 

America would not be appropriate, for it relies upon a historical version of 

that culture which is Eurocentric and white. On the other hand, ethnic 

rivalries bring conflicts and separation. Jay´s suggestion to solve this situation 

is to change the thinking around multiculturalism, shifting the attention from 

the fostering of identity to the building of respect for the Other. 

The insistence on approaching literary works from the cultural (ethnic) 

point of view has always been (and will always be) confronted with the 

necessity to read into them, in addition to their literary (aesthetic) values, 

also various extra-literary, very often ideological, or sociological, values. This 

would not be unusual, since, as Bercovitch maintains, “literary criticism has a 

double task. It is responsible for its evidence to textual realities that are 

uniquely here, in a world of their own, and broadly out there, in history and 

society” (Bercovitch, p. 70). According to Bercovitch, this is the political 

aspect of the literary, which is not simple and cannot be reduced only to 

ethnic or racial questions, but includes many other sociological, economic, or 

material issues. Guerin in a way confirms this in his famous A Handbook of 

Critical Approaches to Literature when he claims that cultural studies, among 

other things, “analyzes not only the cultural work that is produced but also 

the means of production” 2 (Guerin, p. 241). Thus, writing about a particular 

text, a literary critic, especially in the USA, has been faced with the necessity 

to decide how to address the political of the text; to take it as the text´s 

2 This covers a whole range of sociological and political issues which are beyond the scope of 

this article, and thus cannot be dealt with in detail. Let me just say that Guerin briefly 

illustrates this dimension of cultural studies, for example, on Hawthorne´s work, by pointing 

to the conditions he had to work under when producing his best work, the short story 

“Young Goodman Brown”, or the novel The Scarlet Letter. With both of these works, 

Hawthorne had to struggle with his own family history (imagining his predecessors´ 

contempt towards his being a writer, not having some other, nobler job), with the market, as 

well as with what we could call a “gender issue” (the market was supplied by domestic, 

sentimental themes by writers like Catherine Sedgwick or Harriet Beecher Stowe, which 

affected the perspective the readers had on his powerful portrayals of female characters). 

10

constitutive value, its “life force”, its raison d’être, or to ignore it, render it 

invisible, and concentrate on the text´s purely “literary or universal values”. 

Recent years have seen a strong inclination towards the second, political, 

type of literary studies in all its three basic component parts: literary theory, 

criticism, and history. 

In spite of the complexity of ways cultural studies applies to a literary text 

(material conditions of production, sociological issues, gender issues, etc.), 

perhaps the most important “American contribution” is multiculturalism, for 

a simple reason, i.e. that the USA has originated from, and is made up of, 

many different nationalities. This fact governs every aspect of the current 

literary process in the USA and, according to the majority of contemporary 

critics, should be reflected in the systematic steering away from its traditional 

treatments. To illustrate this, I would like to return again to Jay´s idea of 

substituting the concept of “American” Literature with “Writing in the United 

States”: “Clearly a multicultural reconception of “Writing in the United 

States” will lead us to change drastically or eventually abandon the 

conventional historical narratives, period designations, and major themes 

and authors previously dominating ‘American literature’. ‘Colonial’ American 

writing, as I have already suggested, looks quite different from the standpoint 

of postcolonial politics and theory today, and that period will be utterly 

recast when Hispanic and Native-American and non-Puritan texts are allowed 

their just representation. What would be the effect of designating 

Columbus´s Journal, the Narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, or the 

creation myths of Native peoples as the origins of US literature, rather than 

Bradford´s Of Plymouth Plantation? To take another example, the already 

shopworn idea of the ‘American renaissance,’ probably the most famous and 

persistent of our period myths, ought to be replaced by one that does not 

reinforce the idea that all culture – even all Western culture – has its 

authorised origins in Greco-Roman civilization” (Jay, 1991, p. 57). 

I made use of this (rather long) quotation to illustrate that the efforts to 

see American literature through new eyes are all-encompassing, affecting all 

aspects and categories of literary studies in the USA. They are happening in 

an atmosphere of heightened cultural awareness, which frequently leads to 

“culture wars” and conflicts, but nevertheless shapes what is meant by the 

concept of “American”, “Americanness”, or even of such historically “stable” 

meaning as “the American dream”. As the above quotation shows, this 

tendency affects not only contemporary literature, but goes to the 

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grassroots. What was once considered as the defining experience of 

American culture, the English colonisation and the Puritan venture, is now 

presented as only one of the events contributing to the creation of the 

American imagination. Instead, a growing emphasis is put on other cultural 

influences. And quite rightly, since events which coincided with the Puritan 

colonization had hardly ever been noted by literary historians, or, what is 

even worse, had been violently suppressed. One such event is noted by 

Timothy B. Powell in his Ruthless Democracy, when describing how a 

Shawnee chief, Moluntha, was murdered by one of Colonel Logan´s soldiers 

during his attempt to peacefully negotiate their land rights (Powell, p. 3). 

Powell interprets this as an event which, from the very beginning, prevented 

the possibility of peaceful coexistence between various cultures: “It is here, in 

this violent clash of the imagined communities of “America,” that the central 

conflict of Ruthless Democracy comes sharply into focus. The moment just 

before Moluntha falls constitutes an instance of profound hope - when two 

men from vastly different cultures approach one another, each bearing the 

US flag. For this flickering instant the promise of ‘America’ as a symbol 

capable of embracing richly disparate peoples within the inclusive democratic 

rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence seems hauntingly possible” 

(Powell, p. 3). 

The murder of Moluntha is, according to Powell, the symbolic beginning of 

cultural and racial clashes, resulting from an unfulfilled promise by America 

to observe its basic principles as expressed in the Declaration of 

Independence (“All men are created equal”). Of course, this is just one 

incident, but, in my opinion, one could find many more of them in America´s 

history. The incident brings the author to ask the basic question lying behind 

contemporary culture wars: “Why has it been so difficult for the country to 

acknowledge and accept its historic multicultural character?” (Powell, p. 4). 

Naturally, the answer would go far beyond the scope of this article. And 

there is no need for that. The question itself would be enough to justify the 

present attempts at historical correction. Everyone should understand why 

there are so many approaches to discuss literature from so many angles – 

simply because the USA is a heterogeneous country (it has always been such), 

and its democratic institutions do not prevent anyone from providing 

whatever interpretation of what one has read. This is a natural democratic 

process. The problem is, however, whether the concept of democracy is the 

best suitable tool for analysing literature. 

12

To better understand the situation in the USA, one can point to similar 

instances elsewhere. It is widely acknowledged that one of the most striking 

attempts to mix the non-literary (the ideological, political) with the literary in 

Central and Eastern Europe was so-called socialist realism. The method grew 

out of a certain political and cultural situation – the origin of the proletariat 

and the building of new socialist states. Its basic aim was to foster literature 

and literary criticism which would help the cause of socialism, i.e. building 

socialist and communist societies and suppressing capitalist thinking 

(literature, philosophy, etc.). One could not interpret literary works only on 

the basis of literary, aesthetic values, but had to use Marxist-Leninist 

philosophy as a tool, giving the clearest picture of the conditions portrayed in 

the work, i.e. whether a particular character was positive, acting to further 

the cause of the Communist party, or negative, in which case the character 

was found “reactionary”, supporting “rotten capitalist ideas”. If, in the end, 

the whole work was found reactionary, it was either severely criticised or 

even forbidden, depending on whether the critic lived in the period of the 

“hard-liners”, or in the so-called “easing off” period. The principle of utmost 

importance was that literature was not just aesthetic blabbering, but a force 

which should help improve society, working in collaboration with other social 

sciences and institutions. Literary works were expected to address the issues 

of the Communist Party, describe workers and their problems, their 

exploitation, and their struggle. 

Why did I mention this here? Is socialist realism not a thing of the past? 

No, I do not think so, since many of the principles of studying literature 

through “cultural studies” are, in my opinion, “socialist realism in disguise”. In 

what other way can one explain the principles of cultural studies mentioned 

by Guerin in his A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, stating that 

the cultural studies approach to literature transcends the confines of a 

particular discipline, is politically engaged, denies the separation of high and 

low culture, and analyzes not only the cultural work that is produced, but 

also the means of production (Guerin, pp. 240-241)? Allowing for some 

differences, the similarities cannot be overlooked. The most important 

include, naturally, the requirement that cultural studies should be “politically 

engaged” and that it also analyses the “means of production”. The question 

of why I mention this similarity might be put again. The answer would be that 

the political engagement of literary critics in post-WW II socialist countries 

was responsible for some of the grossest misinterpretations and abuses of 

13

culture and society in human history. The problem was not that some writers 

addressed the difficult lives of the poor at the end of the nineteenth and the 

beginning of the twentieth century, but that a particularity was made to be a 

norm – i.e., that the writers who did not address the issues of the “working 

people” (the proletariat) were excluded, ostracised, labelled as the enemies 

of the system, and, finally, prohibited to publish. I admit that the situation in 

a democratic society can never get so far as to suppress, or even jail the 

dissidents. But the principle remains the same – the creation of an 

expectation that literature should be politically active, should be in the 

service of the previously wronged, exploited, is a disservice both to literature 

and the politically oppressed as well. That the tendency to use literature as a 

political tool is, nowadays, almost omnipresent cannot be denied. It is 

enough if one just looks at the names of conferences and congresses 

organised during the recent several years – there are hardly any which 

concentrate on literature, and not on political or ideological agenda. 

What would be the way out of this, in my opinion, unhappy situation? 

Should we deny the link of literature to extra-literary contexts, rid it of its 

influence upon the lived reality? Should we get back to the old “art for art´s 

sake” principle? Is it true that literature is just fiction, without any meaning 

for one´s individual life, for the life of a community, or for the life of an ethnic 

group? Not at all. Believing this would mean denying literature some of its 

most important functions. We would deny that works of art were, after all, 

written by real people, and that they are to be read by real people using 

them in various life situations. 

One of the answers to tackle this situation can be found in Sacvan 

Bercovitch´s article “The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural 

Studies”, in which he acknowledges the strength and validity of cultural 

studies by saying that it is here and will probably stay with us. One cannot 

ignore it, for its cause was legitimate, having been a product of a legitimate 

and unsatisfied need, as I tried to demonstrate above in the situation of 

American literature and culture. What is important, however, is that “as it 

[cultural studies] grows and flourishes it will preserve the literary in what still 

remains the literary and cultural studies” (p. 69). Demonstrating the rules and 

principles operating within social sciences and literary studies using a game 

of chess as an analogy, Bercovitch concludes that “we are always already 

more than our culture tells us we are, just as a language is more than a 

discipline and just as a literary text is more than the sum of the explanations, 

14

solutions, probabilities, and abstractions that it accumulates as it travels 

across time and space” (p. 82). 

Even more poignant, however, in this context, is an article by Edward Said, 

one of the founders of postcolonial studies and an outstanding cultural critic. 

The poignancy springs especially from the fact that one would never expect 

an avowed “ideological critic” to write what he did in his “The Politics of 

Knowledge”. There, Said describes a situation when he was attacked at a 

conference by a professor, “a black woman of some eminence who had 

recently come to the university, but whose work was unfamiliar to me”, 

accusing him that in his contribution he “talked only about white European 

males” (1991, p. 18). Taken by surprise, Said explained that he did not know 

why he should not be speaking about white European males if the subject of 

his presentation was European imperialism. Taking this as a model situation, 

he further elaborated on what is happening in current criticism. On one side, 

he claims, the American academia is now aware “that the society and culture 

have been the heterogeneous product of heterogeneous people in enormous 

variety of cultures, traditions, and situations” (p. 25). On the other side, 

however, it is not enough only to “reaffirm the paramount importance of 

formerly suppressed and silenced forms of knowledge and leave it at that” (p. 

26), but it is necessary to engage them in a global cultural setting of world 

literature, for which he uses the term worldliness. 

His overall argument could be summarised in the following two 

quotations: “One of the great pleasures for those who read and study 

literature is the discovery of longstanding norms in which all cultures known 

to me concur: such things as style and performance, the existence of good as 

well as lesser writers, and the exercise of preference. What has been most 

unacceptable during the many harangues on both sides of the so-called 

Western canon debate is that so many of the combatants have ears of tin, 

and are unable to distinguish between good writing and politically correct 

attitudes, as if a fifth-rate pamphlet and a great novel have more or less the 

same significance” (p. 30). Getting back to the situation with which he started 

his argumentation, Said provides the following conclusion: “Although I risk 

over-simplification, it is probably correct to say that it does not finally matter 

who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read. The 

idea that because Plato and Aristotle are male and the products of a slave 

society they should be disqualified from receiving contemporary attention is 

15

as limited an idea as suggesting that only their work, because it was 

addressed to and about elites, should be read today” (p. 31). 

Both the abovementioned authors 3 can be taken as signs that we may be 

witnessing the seeds of change, equivalent maybe to the changes of the 

1930s when the New Criticism brought a revolutionary idea of text-centred 

criticism, or to the 1960s’ adoption of the first post-structural ideas in 

American literary criticism. What would/could the new criticism be like? As it 

is never possible to totally dismiss the New Critical principles of having to 

deal with the text, it is also not possible to separate literary study from its 

social and cultural circumstances, or deny that in every literary text there is 

an inherent playfulness and indeterminacy of deconstructive criticism. It all 

depends on a point of view a critic chooses to adopt in approaching a work of 

art, on his/her sense of balance in explicating the text´s individual qualities, 

for, to get back to Said´s claim, works of literature “are in fact differently 

constituted and have different values, they aim to do different things, exist in 

different genres, and so on” (p. 30). Their localisation in a particular culture is 

just one of their constitutive features - and a critic´s resolution to look at a 

work through “cultural” lenses does not have to be regarded as “the moral 

equivalent of a war or a political crisis” (p. 30). 

In the next part of the paper I will try to discuss American 

transcendentalism as the movement which contributed to the establishment 

of America´s “cultural independence”, and trace its cultural legacy in the 

poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. In doing that, I would like to 

point to a justification in claims making transcendentalists responsible for the 

“Eurocentric” ideas in American culture, emphasising their embeddedness in 

European philosophical and literary thinking, and, on the other hand, to show 

that their supposed “localisation” in European culture is in no conflict with 

current multicultural trends. 

It goes without saying that, in the context of “traditional” American 

criticism, transcendentalists have been attributed with a very significant, 

even constitutive role. The credit for this goes especially to the work of F. O. 

Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of 

Emerson and Whitman, in which, by emphasising the work of Emerson, 

Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman, he put foundations to the 

3 One should not forget, naturally, Jonathan Culler and his The Literary in Theory. 

16

American canon which came to be generally accepted as a unique expression 

of the American imagination up to the second half of the twentieth century, 

replacing the then widespread New England´s cosmopolitan and intellectual 

“genteel tradition” of Longfellow, Holmes and Lowell. 

What was American transcendentalism? In general, it is considered to 

have been an informal movement of several intellectuals in New England, 

especially in the area of Boston, then the cultural centre of the USA. 

Transcendentalists were not only involved in literary studies, but were also 

active in such fields as philosophy, religion, social theory, etc. Their literary 

contribution is usually associated with the names of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 

the movement´s primary theoretician, and Henry David Thoreau, the man 

who tried to “live” Emerson´s theories. Emerson came up with the first 

coherent ideas of what it means (and takes) to be American, giving a new 

meaning to American culture. 4 His transcendentalism was a response, via 

Unitarianism, to a strong Calvinist culture of the first immigrants for whom 

the New World was a place of spiritual “purification” and betterment of 

Europe´s corrupted institutions and faith, a new manifestation of the biblical 

“city upon a hill” (Winthrop, 2006). Emerson replaced the spiritual austerity 

and allegorical vision of the world of Puritans with the romantic conception 

of nature and symbolic imagination. In this respect, Harold Bloom (1997) sees 

“severely displaced Puritanism” as a predecessor not only for American 

transcendentalism, but for the English Romantic poets as well. However, 

while the British poets managed to liberate themselves from it, the 

Americans try to complete its work. There are many other theoretical works 

dealing with the “puritanism – unitarianism – transcendentalism” line in 

Emerson´s thinking, but this will not be pursued here, since my aim is to 

present American transcendentalism through its development of the 

nineteenth century´s European romantic thinking, mainly of some German 

ideas and their influence on the thinking of the English romantic poet S. T. 

Coleridge, using the concept of nature as espoused in Emerson´s essay 

Nature. 

The concept of nature has always played a significant role in American 

culture. According to Leo Marx, “The idea of nature is – or, rather, was – one 

4 See Emerson´s address to the Phi Beta Kappa society, known as “The American Scholar” and 

delivered at Harvard in 1837, in which he claimed that “We have listened to long to the 

courtly muses of Europe” (Emerson, 2006a, p. 1620). 

17

of the fundamental American ideas. In its time it served – as the ideas of 

freedom, democracy, or progress did in theirs – to define the meaning of 

America. For some three centuries, in fact, from the founding of Jamestown 

in 1607 to the closing of the Western frontier in 1890, the encounter of white 

settlers with what they perceived as wilderness – unaltered nature – was the 

defining American experience” (2008, p. 8). Emerson´s understanding of 

nature, however, differed from the ideas of the first immigrants, the Puritans, 

for whom nature was a seat of something dark, unknown, dangerous, a seat 

of wild tribes with whom they had to fight – the metaphor of evil, death. 

Much closer to his ideas is the sentimental portrayal of nature in the work of 

James Fenimore Cooper who stood at the beginning of a potent American 

myth – the unending struggle of nature with civilisation in which nature had 

to gradually give way to the settlers´ rising demands. Some generally known 

Cooper´s novels, e.g. the Leatherstocking Tales, presented nature as a 

positive place of living, of “noble savages”, in contrast to the destructionbringing 

white settlers. Nature could be understood as a metaphorical 

expression of “paradise”, doomed to perish because of civilisation. 

Contrary to the above, in many respects simplified, approaches to nature, 

Emerson brings a complex, though eclectic, theory of the organic character of 

nature and imagination, based on several sources. The extent of his 

eclecticism and orientation towards the world´s literature and philosophy can 

be illustrated by his diary, in which, according to Cunliffe, he sets for himself 

the following task: “Thou shalt read Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 

Aristophanes, Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Aristotle, Virgil, 

Plutarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, 

Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Bacon, 

Marvell, More, Milton, Molliere, Swedenborg, Goethe” (Cunliffe, 1970, pp. 

89-90). And Cunliffe further claims that he really read them, as well as 

Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle and oriental philosophers (ibid.). 

Since it is not possible to distinguish such extensive inspirations, I will 

concentrate on approaching his theory through the theory of romanticism, as 

it was manifested especially in the thinking of the English romantic poet 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and expressed especially in his essay “On Poesy or 

Art” (1952a). However, when discussing Coleridge´s influence, one must also 

mention Immanuel Kant, since it was his Critique of Pure Reason from which 

transcendentalists took the name of their movement as well as the basic 

tendency of their thought. This German-English influence was also 

18

highlighted by René Wellek when he notes that “Coleridge´s theory is closely 

dependent on the Germans” (1964, p. 180). 

If we speak about transcendentalism as a non-formal movement within 

romanticism, we have to be aware of the fact that in those times the concept 

of romanticism, as we know it nowadays, was not constituted. The writers 

and critics did not see themselves as belonging to a defined movement. Its 

gradual taking shape is discussed by René Wellek in his book Concepts of 

Criticism in which he points out that the term “romantic poetry” was first 

used to refer, for example, to the romances of Ariosto or Tasso (p. 131). As 

Wellek further maintains, the term romantic was also used for Shakespeare, 

and the “classical – romantic” contradiction was crystallised only later in 

August Wilhelm Schlegel´s Berlin lectures from 1801 to 1804. Wellek follows 

a gradual domestication of the concept in other European literatures as well 

(French, English, northern as well as Slavic literatures). I will be concerned, 

however, only with the German version and its outgrowth to English 

romantic theory, since this is the line which was followed by American 

transcendentalism as well. It stems mainly from Schlegel´s aforementioned 

distinction between the classical and the romantic. Classical is associated 

with the poetry of the ancients, while romantic with modern poetry, with the 

progressive and Christian (p. 135). Schlegel elaborates on this distinction 

further in his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature: “The ancient art and 

poetry rigorously separate things which are dissimilar; the romantic delights 

in indissoluble mixtures; all contrarieties: nature and art, poetry and prose, 

seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and 

sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death, are by it blended together 

in the most intimate combination” (2004). 

Coleridge was strongly influenced by Schlegel´s thinking. His most 

complex expression of the essence of romanticism can be found in the 

lecture “On Poesy or Art” in which Coleridge tries, using elusively an almost 

mystical language, to point out a mutual conditioning of nature, man, and the 

supernatural principle. Art is, in his opinion, an imitation of nature, but it is 

not irrelevant what is imitated and how. “The artist must imitate that which 

is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and 

discourses to us by symbols—the Natur-geist, or spirit of nature” (p. 397). “If 

the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry” (p. 

396)! It is necessary to “master the essence natura naturans, which 

presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of 

19

man” (ibid.). The beauty of nature is “the unity of the manifold, the 

coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely 

(formosum) with the vital” (p. 395). Nature is the source of primordial art, 

that is, the writing in its various cultural manifestations – as the original 

movement, 5 as wampum; then picture-language; then hieroglyphics, and 

finally alphabetic letters” (p. 393). It is (for a religious observer) “the art of 

God” (p. 394), “a work of art” (ibid.), if we are able to see “the thought which 

is present at once in the whole and in every part” (ibid.). 

Emerson´s fundamental essay, Nature, of 1836, draws on exactly the same 

understanding of romanticism, 6 though in a typically Emersonian form, i.e. in 

a unique mixture of conceptual and metaphorical language (Coleridge´s 

language was much more rational) set into a new context – the culture of the 

New World which, if it were to be original, could not rely on anything, but 

nature. Nature as a culture-formation phenomenon emerges at its very 

beginning. It is opposed to history (of Europe) and historical knowledge: “Our 

age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes 

biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God 

and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also 

enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry 

and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to 

us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose 

floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they 

supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the 

dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its 

faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in 

the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our 

own works and laws and worship” (Emerson, 2006b, p. 1582). The paragraph 

lays down basic distinctions: immediacy means the New World, America; 

while Europe and the Old World are associated with mediation and 

retrospection. Immediate knowledge is positive, fresh and able to penetrate 

to the essence; mediated knowledge is the very opposite. 

America is a new existence, a new being based on nature, which is the 

basic impulse for a new culture, made up of, and by, people not burdened by 

5 See Derrida´s concept of the movement of the magic wand in his Of Grammatology (1976). 

6 For an insightful discussion of the identification of imagination with nature see also de Man 

(1984). 

20

the past, people who should draw their strength from nature, for whom 

nature should not be an object, but their being, as it forms the being of a 

child: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye 

and the heart of the child” (p. 1583). The effort for an analogy between the 

innocence and spontaneity of a child and a new man, who would preserve 

the spirit of youth, is undeniably clear. Moreover, the relationship between 

nature and man is in some parts even openly occult: “The greatest delight 

which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation 

between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They 

nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to 

me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like 

that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed 

I was thinking justly or doing right” (p. 1584). What he describes here is not, 

however, a mere anthropomorphism of nature, since the ability to provide 

pleasure is not the quality of nature, but of man, or the harmony of both: 

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” (ibid.). 

It is undeniable that what Emerson suggests in several other parts of the 

essay, and what is the basic feature of American transcendentalism, is a 

mutual interdependence of the human, the natural, and the spiritual. The 

most striking expression of this interdependence can be found in the chapter 

“Spirit” where Emerson reflects on the question of the origin and sense of 

the matter: “But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to 

inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the 

recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of 

man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or 

beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things 

exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, 

throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act 

upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through 

ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up 

nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts 

forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old” (p. 1604). 

This poetic expression of transcendental philosophy makes it evident that 

Emerson, like Coleridge, considers nature the essence without which the 

spirit could not have anything to rely on, and man would not have anything 

to perceive. Without man, nature does not exist, for there would be no one 

to perceive it. Without spirit, man would not know how to perceive. As 

21

Coleridge has it, “Something there must be to realise the form, something in 

and by which the forma informans reveals itself” (Coleridge, 1952b, p. 373). 

For Emerson, nature is something through which we can get to beauty and 

God. 

Perhaps the clearest expression of Emerson´s views of beauty is the 

chapter “Beauty” in which he says that beauty serves man to satisfy his 

nobler needs (in the preceding chapter, entitled “Commodity”, he treated 

nature as a source of satisfaction of man´s practical needs), and distinguishes 

its three main features: “[t]he simple perception of natural forms” (2006b, p. 

1586), “[t]he presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element” (p. 

1587), and beauty as “an object of the intellect” (p. 1588). One can see here a 

gradation from simpler forms of beauty, such as delight, through its relation 

to morals, up to its being an expression of an idea. Nature is not just a passive 

object of the artist, but strengthens his/her creativity. Like in Coleridge, 

creativity is not only copying nature, but is its re-creation. It is a romantic 

principle of pantheism, i.e. seeing art as an expression of nature and, through 

it, of the divine principle. In this respect, it has to be mentioned that 

transcendentalists also found inspiration in another English romantic poet, 

William Wordsworth, especially in his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” 

and “Tintern Abbey”. 

Even though the overall manner of Emerson´s relation to nature is highly 

positive, the essay also contains negative tones which foreshadow later 

existential feelings of American artists towards nature: “Nature always wears 

the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own 

fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt 

by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it 

shuts down over less worth in the population” (p. 1584). If we were to find 

other affinities towards European thinking, we could compare it with 

Heidegger or de Man who characterised the American as “man in the center 

of space, man whom nothing protects from the sky and the earth [and 

therefore he] is no doubt closer to the essential than the European, who 

searches for a shelter among beautiful houses polished by history and among 

fields marked by ancestral labor” (de Man, 1989, p. 31). 

Although the essay “Nature” was a manifesto of “transcendentalism”, it 

stood only at the beginning of Emerson´s creative life during which he 

contributed to the establishment of American cultural identity with other 

significant themes as well. Just a year after the publication of “Nature”, in his 

22

lecture before the Phi Beta Kappa Society entitled “The American Scholar” he 

encouraged students to be proud for their “Americanness”: “We have 

listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. [...] We will walk on our 

own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds” 

(Emerson, 2006a, p. 1620). In the essay “The Poet” Emerson reflected on the 

role of poets in society, seeing them in line with contemporary romantic 

views and attributing them almost divine qualities. Poets are not common 

persons, since they are able to penetrate to the essence of things, they are 

“liberating gods” (Emerson, 2006c, p. 1648). The essay´s main idea is very 

similar to P. B. Shelley´s “A Defence of Poetry” who also considers poets 

“unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley, 1952, p. 435). Emerson 

saw such a poet in Walt Whitman who programmatically wanted to be (and 

was) an “American poet”. 

The natural result of Emerson´s theories is the poetry of Walt Whitman. 

According to John Townsend Trowbridge, Whitman read Emerson´s essays 

and was excited by them: “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson 

brought me to a boil” (Trowbridge). The poet sent him an issue of the first 

edition of Leaves of Grass to which Emerson responded with an encouraging 

letter: “Dear Sir--I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Leaves 

of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that 

America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power 

makes us happy. [...] I greet you at the beginning of a great career...” 

(Emerson, 2002). Whitman´s poetry embodied what Emerson strived to 

achieve in his essays – the spirit of America. It was the poetry of democracy, 

of the common man, an individual and his/her relation to nature and the city, 

the poetry trying to capture America in its extent and contradictoriness, in 

the complicated relation of an independent, “self-reliant” person to society. 

Whitman, encouraged by Emerson´s transcendentalism, stands at the 

beginning of a very important tendency in American culture, which could be 

called democratic, or ideological, literature, in the sense of the subordination 

of the aesthetic to the idea. In Whitman´s case, it was the idea of America as 

the “most democratic” country in the world, of America as a new and unique 

value of the New World as opposed to the traditional values of Europe. 

Novelty and democracy is, in Whitman, also expressed thematically and 

formally. He does not reject any themes, including the taboo ones, and uses 

free verse – not only as an expression of the democratic principles of 

America, but as the natural effect of romantic-transcendental principles of 

23

creation, resulting from Coleridge´s and Schlegel´s ideas of the influence of 

nature upon art. 

While the influence of transcendentalism upon Whitman is visible and 

direct, in the case of Emily Dickinson it is more complicated. Undoubtedly, 

she knew Emerson´s work, but her response was totally different from 

Whitman´s. Unlike Whitman, Dickinson was not the type of the poetvisionary 

portrayed by Emerson in his essay. While Whitman was almost an 

absolute embodiment of a natural, robust, and, unburdened-by-convention 

person, an individual interested in the fate of the country in which he lived 

and sang about, Dickinson was his direct opposite – an introverted person 

who did not write about America as a new value, but rather about herself 

and her relationship to basic human values (life, death, love, etc.). She did 

not poetically “celebrate” these values, but made them problematic. Michelle 

Kohler, in her article “Dickinson’s Embodied Eyeball: Transcendentalism and 

the Scope of Vision”, points to the difference between the use of visual 

metaphors by Emerson (and, naturally, Whitman as well) and Dickinson. 

While Emerson, following the romantic method, used language to achieve a 

vision of a fusion with nature, to present national meanings, Dickinson was 

not able to easily get rid of her “corporeality”, to fuse with nature and 

penetrate to a transcendental realm. Nature was, for her, always an object to 

struggle with. But as Allen Tate has noted, this “inability” to easily identify 

with nature is the source of her greatness. He considers Emerson the “Lucifer 

from Concord”, because it was he who “discredited more than any other man 

the puritan drama of the soul” (1955, p. 214), the drama which, for Emily 

Dickinson, was still a source of existential anxieties. As Tate has it, Puritanism 

could not be for her what it could for the first immigrants, but its system of 

absolute truths and abstractions was still quite strong to prevent her 

“immersion in nature” (p. 223). 

While for the first immigrants nature was an enemy, the seat of the devil, 

for Dickinson it was a source of forces subverting the strength of eternal 

truths or at least offering another way of their expression. For example, in 

the poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” the things of nature are 

personifications of her religious ideas; however, as it has been suggested 

above, they are not Emersonian metaphorical visions abolishing the 

difference between the perceiving and the perceived (the “transparent 

eyeball”). 

24

Dickinson perceives nature rather allegorically, but her allegory is 

different from Hawthorne´s, for whom it was an attempt to attribute to 

figures adequate meanings. She strives to come to terms with the materiality 

of being, to “find out” what is beyond. In other poems she personifies nature 

as death, sees (in a “Kantian” way) with her idea and tries, through the poem, 

to physically live it. Tate characterised her as a poet who “perceives 

abstraction and thinks sensation” (p. 213). This almost synaesthetic 

perception of being and nature can be found in the poem “Because I could 

not stop for death” or “I felt a funeral, in my brain.” But her perhaps most 

ontological poem is the poem entitled “Of death I try to think like this” in 

which, according to Deppman, thought attempts to control the presencing of 

death through a series of images following “a pattern of earth, still water, 

running water, and then, after a leap of thought through time and memory, 

the sea and an image of a child leaping over a brook to clutch a flower” 

(2000, p. 5). 

In spite of a widely accepted idea that Emily Dickinson, one of the greatest 

nineteenth century poets, was an utter individualist, a recluse who spent her 

entire life in her “father´s house”, at times refusing to communicate to 

almost anyone, there are several works which adopt a wider, cultural 

perspective on her poetry. 7 As White suggests, “The fact that she was a 

recluse, does not make her any less a product of her culture, as being 

reclusive does not mean being totally sealed off from the world” (2008, p. 

107); on the contrary, Emily Dickinson was a person who was deeply affected 

by it. That world, however, is not easy to describe, as it is not easy to describe 

any poet´s lived reality. One can only try to estimate it from her work, 

because it seems that she was one of those poets for whom the work and life 

are one, not willing to make any of them public. 

What is traditionally considered to be unique in Dickinson´s poetry is its 

form. She was born in an America which was still largely agricultural and 

provincial, not very significant in the world either politically or culturally. 

From the material point of view, until the outbreak of the Civil War, her 

world could not have been shattered by any significant event. She spent her 

life in a large country house, having all necessary means for a comfortable 

7 See, for example, Karl Keller´s The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and 

America (1979), Barton Levi St. Armand´s Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul´s Society 

(1984), Fred D. White´s Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents and Crosscurrents 

Since 1960 (2008), or numerous feminist studies. 

25

life. That was, however, only the outward side of her existence, since in her 

inward reality, things stood differently. Maybe the most characteristic words 

explaining what this reality was like could be found in the following poem: 

On my volcano grows the Grass 

A meditative spot -- 

An acre for a Bird to choose 

Would be the General thought -- 

How red the Fire rocks below -- 

How insecure the sod 

Did I disclose 

Would populate with awe my solitude. 

(Dickinson, p. 685) 

We see that the peaceful and meditative atmosphere of the first stanza 

(with the exception of the word “volcano”), signifying her everyday home life 

is here contrasted with the heat and insecurity (“sod”) threatening to erupt 

from her inner feelings. This conflict within her own personality is nothing 

else but her imaginative response to the world, and culture, she lived in. Its 

results are both on the level of form as well as content. Formally, her poems 

are first expressions of the fragmentariness of human consciousness in 

American literature, of the conflicting nature of a modern mind. The poem is 

not a smooth rhythmical expression of a sentimental theme, as the popular 

opinion of her contemporaries would expect from a woman, but shows 

fragments of thought, as shown by unfinished sentences and dashes. 8 The 

metre, a typically Dickinsonian hymn metre ending up in the last line´s iambic 

8 In the first editions of Dickinson´s work, dashes were absent because editors adjusted her 

verses, in order to conform to contemporary taste and literary standards. They were 

restored only in the so-called Johnson edition of 1955 (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 

including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts). Although this 

edition was first considered to have introduced to the public a totally new Dickinson, 

unconventional and modern, there have also appeared some critical responses, claiming that 

Dickinson manuscripts show her understanding of poetry as a process and that Johnson, by 

translating “Dickinson´s handwritten production into ... uniform type, [made it] ‘sound’ 

considerably less dramatic” than it in fact is (Smith, p. 17). 

26

pentameter, also contributes to the poem´s effect of a threatening volcanic 

eruption. 9 

In spite of numerous works attempting to localise Dickinson within 

cultural contexts (modernistic, postmodern, feminist, popular culture, 

romantic, etc.), in my opinion, one of the best analyses was offered by Allen 

Tate in the abovementioned short article, entitled simply “Emily Dickinson”. 

Tate is not concerned with the superficial features of Dickinson´s work or life, 

like many other studies, but tries to get to the heart of the matter. He 

characterises Dickinson´s poetry as the poetry of ideas, demanding readers to 

think, although the poet herself is not considered to be a consciously 

philosophising poet, being rather one who “sees the ideas, and thinks the 

perceptions” (1964, p. 220), not telling the readers “what to think”, but 

asking us “to look at the situation” (p. 220). Tate maintains that the source of 

the tension within her poetry is the fact that she wrote from a “deep 

culture”, not from cultural paraphernalia (p. 222). It is the depth of a long 

lasting grip of American Puritanism and its gradual giving way to new trends 

of industrialism. Emily Dickinson senses that the old order with its clear 

principles regarding, for example, religious and ethical values, breaks down, 

and through her poems exposes its incongruities. As he further stresses, she 

does that subconsciously, without knowing it. This is why we could 

characterise her not as a poet-thinker, but as a poet whose work invites 

thinking. Sensing incongruities, a dilapidation of the culture’s spiritual 

homogeneity, and attempting to express the sensations in language, not 

intentionally to put them to public scrutiny, but to tackle first of all her own 

anxieties, this is what her poetry is about; and also why her poetry is so 

fragmentary. It cannot be otherwise, for what she attempts to express, to 

arrive at, is cultural as well as spiritual otherness. 

The concept of otherness can be used to describe a good artist´s relation 

to his/her culture. He/she senses that something ought to be different, other, 

but does not know what. His/her work is always a way of searching for the 

other, a never-to-be-completed effort to capture it. Dickinson did not know 

what it was in her world that she fundamentally disagreed with, but that it 

was her Puritan world which was breaking down and causing her anxieties. 

9 See the feminist approach to Dickinson’s metre in Annie Finch´s The Ghost of Meter: Culture 

and Prosody in American Free Verse (2000), especially the chapter “Dickinson and Patriarchal 

Meter: A Theory of the Metrical Code”. 

27

Superficially, undoubtedly, she was aware of many things she did not like. 

The critic´s role, however, is to disclose the artist´s deep relation to his/her 

culture, in all its complexity, and show it. We cannot be satisfied with 

paraphernalia only. 

Dickinson and Whitman are as if embodiments of the two contradicting 

tendencies within American literature of the nineteenth century. It is a 

conflict between the surviving culture of Puritans, based on Calvinist sources 

and searching for God in the book, the Bible, in the idea, and the culture 

emanating from the (American) soil, from nature. Allowing for slight 

overestimation and simplification, it could also be called a conflict between 

the old, historical, European, and the new, natural, American. Emerson was 

as if a catalyst of this struggle for a new culture of the New World, a culture 

which would not just be a copy of the Old World. 

However, the consequences of Emerson´s transcendentalism are not only 

in inspiring a new (American) culture of romantic immediacy to nature. For 

some critics, especially the New Critics, Emerson was also a person who, by 

defeating the Puritan idea of God, and by setting the thinking and being to 

the materiality of nature, paradoxically inspired American materialism. Tate 

maintains that by killing the theocracy he “accelerated a tendency that he 

disliked. It was a great intellectual mistake. By it Emerson unwittingly became 

the prophet of a piratical industrialism, a consequence of his own 

transcendental individualism that he could not foresee” (p. 214). Others saw 

in “American renaissance”, whose main personality was Emerson, one of the 

most familiar American myths which should, however, be replaced by a new 

one, not based on the idea “that all culture – even all Western culture – has 

its authorised origins in Greco-Roman civilisation” (Jay, 1991, p. 57). 

Taking into account prevailing tendencies in current American literary 

studies, i.e. approaching literature especially through cultural studies, it may 

be claimed that even if transcendentalism is mostly associated with the 

identification of the romantic fusion of subject and object, with the idea of an 

ontological approach to art, with an approach to nature as pantheistic 

principle - which are, in fact, “Eurocentric” conceptions of art - both Emerson 

and Thoreau significantly contributed to the development of America´s 

“new” culture which would draw inspiration from other sources as well. Most 

protagonists of current cultural studies tend to forget the fact that Emerson, 

obsessed by “history and culture” (Worley, 2001, p. vii), could not be called 

literary nationalist, since in addition to his extensive knowledge of European 

28

literature and culture, there have been quite a few valuable studies 

identifying “oriental” sources in his work as well as the influences his thinking 

had on “oriental philosophers”. Thus, in the article “East of Emerson” Susan 

Dunston has analysed Emerson´s relationship to Eastern thinking, especially 

to Persian poetry, which he used in his concept of an ideal poet. She pointed 

out that Emerson was trying to open America to Eastern culture, to the 

novelty which that poetry represented. The novelty of perception was one of 

the key concepts in his essay “Nature” as well (Dunston, 2010). 

Not less known is Emerson´s relation to Indian thinking. Adisasmito-Smith 

admits that “The bulk of Emerson´s Essays are not predicated primarily upon 

ideas he had encountered in Indian texts. But such ideas were present in 

significant ways” and “inflected his ideas” (2010, p. 145). However, my aim is 

not to identify oriental sources in Emerson´s works, but rather to point to the 

fact that his legacy is complex and cannot be associated only with Western 

influences. His inspiration by other cultures, as well as respecting other 

cultures, is clearly noted by Suzan Jameel Fakahani at the end of her essay 

“Islamic Influences on Emerson´s Thought: The Fascination of a Nineteenth 

Century American Writer”: “Emerson´s deep and early interest in Arab 

thought and culture stems primarily from his enthusiasm to create a united 

world culture; which places him in the vanguard of America´s 

internationalists. He did not advocate Islamic thought and religion as a 

substitute for Western concepts, but as a complement to them” (Fakahani, 

1998, p. 301). 

It seems, however, that Emerson´s “internationalism” has much weaker 

support in contemporary America than Europe. One of the reasons for this 

may be the stability of past cultural foundations, as Wilczynski noted in his 

essay dealing with the nineteenth century´s culture wars: “Be it Germany, 

France, Poland, Hungary, or Latvia, all the local cultural formations seem 

much more stable in the eyes of respective national communities [...] than 

American antebellum culture appears in the eyes of today´s students born 

and/or raised somewhere between New York and San Francisco. Not only the 

standard “central” figures of the first half of the nineteenth century turn out 

much less disputable (Goethe, Hugo, Adam Mickiewicz, Sandor Petofi, 

Christian Waldemar), but the overall order of less prominent authors, as well 

as publications, genres, and values proves comparatively immune to major 

overhauls or even partial revisions” (2006, p. 505). On the contrary, as he 

continues, the American literary scene is characterised by controversy, 

29

ignoring long-established writers and throwing up “names and texts which 

have been long-forgotten or downplayed by academia and other institutions 

responsible for cultural circulation” (ibid.). 

As a suitable conclusion to my discussion of Emerson´s transcendentalism, 

and, through it, a commentary on current multiculturalism and “culture 

wars”, as well as on the enforcements of multicultural heterogeneity of 

American literature, frequently at the expense of its universal values, I would 

like to use the following quotation from Emerson´s work which, even though 

referring to religion, I find instructive also for literary studies: “In matters of 

religion, men eagerly fasten their eyes on the differences between their 

creed and yours, whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements 

and identities in all the religions of men” (1909, pp. 226-227). Thus, similarly, 

the charm of the study of literature is in finding what connects people, not 

what separates them. Variety and heterogeneity are of no use if they breed 

confusion and fear, not the sense of unity and shared destiny. 

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32

Wilczynski, M. 2006. “American Culture Wars: 1803-1861.” American 

Transcendental Quarterly, Sep. 2006, 20, 3, pp. 505-511. 

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33

American Urban Landscape – the Progress 

that does not Move 


In the 2005 novel The Brooklyn Follies (2005) Paul Auster sets up the 

following situation: The narrator of the novel, Nathan Glass came to Brooklyn 

to find “a quiet place to die” (2005, p. 1). He exchanged a nice suburban 

house, after his marriage collapsed, for the obscure streets of Brooklyn, allied 

by brownstones. There, in a bookstore, he meets his nephew Tom, the only 

son of his late sister: “The boy so smart, so articulate, so well-read …” 

(Auster, 2005, p. 13). Once a promising scholar, Tom had graduated from 

university by defending his senior thesis on “Imaginative Edens: The life of 

the Mind in Pre-Civil War America.” “It´s about non-existent worlds, my 

nephew said. A study of the inner refuge, a map of the place a man goes to 

when life in the real world is no longer possible” (ibid., p. 14). 

Edgar Allan Poe, one of the writers discussed in the thesis, in his halfessays, 

half-stories, gives a description of the ideal room, the ideal house, 

and the ideal landscape, possible places of retreat. In the one that depicts the 

ideal landscape, the narrator tells a story of his friend Ellison, who, inheriting 

a vast fortune, decided to invest it in “novel forms of beauty, […] in the 

creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness” (Poe, 1847). As the 

narrator argues in Poe’s story, The Domain of Arnheim (1847), “Ellison 

became neither musician nor poet; although no man lived more profoundly 

enamoured of music and poetry. … But Ellison maintained that the richest, 

the truest and most natural, if not altogether the most expensive province, 

had been unaccountably neglected. No definition had spoken of the 

landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend that the 

creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most 

magnificent of opportunities” (ibid.). 

Poe’s sketch suggests the possibility of each human mind to create a 

landscape garden, an imaginary Eden, and thus aspire to a spiritual way. So, 

what are the opportunities offered to real poets more than a century later? 

Borrowing Poe’s exaltation with space, I claim that two of the most 

prominent contemporary American writers, on whom I focus, Paul Auster 

34

and Don DeLillo, are poets of space. They are architects of contemporary 

urban landscape in the poetic space of the postmodernist American novel. 

What is their vision of the contemporary world? 

In the abovementioned Aster’s novel, the character of Tom further 

explains why Poe and Thoreau, two great thinkers of the nineteenth century, 

“reinvented America”. “Both men believed in America, and both believed 

that America had gone to hell” (Auster, 2005, p. 16). Thus, they invented 

their imaginative Edens. Do Auster and DeLillo reinvent their Americas as 

well? 

The most persistent heritage of the Enlightenment, the belief in man, not 

only as politically, socially, and morally perfectible, but in a man with an 

inevitable tendency to improve, had a strong influence on the nineteenthcentury 

United States. As Merle Curti asserts in his The Growth of American 

Thought (1943), the concept of progress is the most significant contribution 

of the eighteen century to the nineteenth (2004, p. 165). In everyday 

American life it was translated mostly as the advancement in technology. 

Gradually, the everyday life of Americans was coming closer to the promise 

of modernity. New ways of communication, new ways of travelling, health 

care, social life. 

The new urban space of the end of the nineteenth century, lit by electric 

bulbs at night, filled with facilities of entertainment: theatres, shows, 

vaudevilles, which richer people came to visit by car, became rapidly 

transformed over the past century. More and more people live in cities. Cities 

have become live organisms throbbing to the rhythms of utilitarian life. 

American progress may be a mythical concept, but its most pragmatic 

aspects we can find reflected in the organisation of everyday life. As Pynchon 

would have it: a circuit of roads, a maze of parking lots, enabling the access 

to contemporary icons of cultural and social life – supermarkets. The urban 

iconography contains suburban houses, downtown diners, territories of 

subway networks, commercial lights flickering. In them, the forward 

movement of technological progress has been manifested. But how far did 

the human soul go? How elevated did it become? Does it still seek the retreat 

into the imaginative Edens of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? 

My first example will be the notorious ending of DeLillo’s novel White 

Noise (1984). Following an airborne toxic event, which paralysed and 

threatened the peaceful status quo of a small university town, DeLillo depicts 

one of the most captivating scenes in contemporary American literature. “We 

35

go to the overpass all the time. Babette, Wilder, and I. We take a thermos of 

iced tea, park the car, watch the setting sun” (DeLillo, 1998, p. 324). Due to 

the effects of the ecological catastrophe, it is impossible to say whether the 

spectacular sunsets that all the town’s residents come and see regularly are 

the results of breached ecological balance or natural phenomena. Using 

simple, declarative sentences that just describe the scene, it appears in front 

of our eyes as a panoramic stage scene where element by element the 

assemblage grows until the final frozen image, the tableau. In its cumulative 

effect, it reminds us of religious congregations during the rituals where the 

crowd experiences the sense of communion that helps it to overcome awe of 

the metaphysical sublime. The readers become also the spectators, joining 

the crowd and watching the simulacrum sunset. 

The narrator in the book comments on the scene: “We find little to say to 

each other” (ibid.). The speechless quality of the scene brings to the mind 

silent spaces in the paintings of Edward Hopper, one of the most recognised 

representatives of American art. We find in his oeuvre the image of a sunset 

with the same momentum as if beyond the limit of time: “The sky takes on 

content, feeling, an exalted narrative life” (ibid.). Hopper’s other works, 

namely those which depict an isolated figure or figures in space, express the 

same speechless narrative quality. They are presented as isolated from one 

another, from themselves, part of the environment in the same way as other 

inanimate elements. But they also contain the elements of urban landscape 

that are so generic that even after almost a century they speak to the viewers 

with disturbing intensity. “The only possible explanation is that these 

paintings are not taken literally, but as an aesthetic experience, so that a 

thematic interpretation will fail to provide a convincing explanation of their 

appeal. This appeal is related to spaces or, more precisely, to the empty 

spaces of Hopper's pictures, because it is this empty surface, in its often 

colorful barrenness, that is ideally suited to function as a host for 

aestheticized emotions or moods” (Benesch and Schmidt, 2005, p. 36). 

The aestheticised emotions and moods are also related to the 

iconography of modernity, the urban landscape, roads, highways, traffic 

lights as the following examples from different media suggest. The last 

chapter of DeLillo’s novel opens with the image of a small boy riding his 

tricycle across the highway. The contrast between the ceaseless effort of a 

child to move further on and the sweeping velocity of cars rushing by 

captures the reader. The surreal quality of a dream the scene acquires 

36

(“women could only look, empty-mouthed”) correlates with another 

example, the photographic installations of Gregory Crewdson. 

Crewdson, in some of his series (Dream House, 2002; Twilight, 1998-2002; 

Beneath the Roses, 2008), stages and directs situations which, as a frozen 

single image, contain a whole narrative quality. “Through theatrical lighting 

and the inclusion of fantastic and fairytale-like elements, the artist operates 

within the framework of staged photography, which, under the influence of 

Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, became established as one of the most 

important forms of artistic photography” (Berg, 2006, p. 24). His installations 

employ a production crew, including lighting supervisors, pyrotechnic 

experts, interior designers, and bug wranglers. Crewdson, similarly to Don 

DeLillo, works with the iconography of suburban landscape, but the realistic 

setting is transformed through stylised installations into a hyperreal space, 

whose atmosphere is at the same time normal and paranormal, filled both 

with wonder and anxiety. In the photograph Merchant’s Row, from his latest 

series Beneath the Roses (2008) a pregnant woman standing at the traffic 

lights in a morning fog is not threatened by cars like Wilder in De Lillo’s novel, 

yet she, her pregnant body dressed in an almost transparent nightgown, 

looks ultimately fragile in contrast to her surroundings. The lightness of 

being, in which Wilder and the pregnant woman are situated because of his 

innocence and her pregnancy, protects both of them against the threats of 

modernity. 

The two writers under scrutiny, DeLillo and Auster, publish some of their 

individual novels as if in response. DeLillo in White Noise (1984) works with 

the concept of a small generic town equipped with the latest sociopathological 

situations: people obsessed with shopping in supermarkets, a 

professor teaching at university a subject that popularises evil diminishing 

thus its potential threat, polluted environment, family in an average status 

quo scared by the fear of death to name just the most significant. Auster 

situates his novel City of Glass (1985) in a specific city - New York, paying 

tribute to its genius loci and hardboiled detective school. 

In Auster’s novel the city becomes the condition, a degree of the 

protagonist’s decision making. A successful writer of detective fiction, Quinn, 

writing under the pseudonym Wilson, turns into a detective, assuming the 

new identity of someone called Auster. As he moves out of his apartment to 

go deeper into the city, in a hunt to resolve the mystery, he becomes 

absorbed by the place and the story. He records in his red notebook the 

37

limits of his existence: “What will happen when there are no more pages in 

the red notebook?” (Auster, 2004, p. 132). 

Similarly to Hopper’s paintings, the environment absorbs the man, they 

become indistinguishable as animate and inanimate objects. At the end of 

the story when Quinn disappears, or, as the narrator points out, when “the 

information has run out” he (the narrator) and his friend, Auster, search for 

Quinn in an apartment that used to belong to a person (Stillman) whose 

identity Quinn originally investigated as a private eye: “We went upstairs and 

found the door to what had once been the Stillman’s apartment. It was 

unlocked” (ibid., p.133). 

Before we enter the room in Paul Auster’s description, I will discuss the 

last great painting by Edward Hopper: The Sun in An Empty Room (1963). The 

original plan for the painting was to include a figure, but then the lightwashed 

immoveable spaces and the trees swashing in the wind behind the 

window sufficed. “Whether we like it or not” Hopper wrote “we are all bound 

to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, 

and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color, and 

design” (Levin, 1995, p. 401). The space depicted in the painting is certainly 

not Stillman’s apartment, but the painting in its restrained simplicity, pure 

lines, elaborate play of shadows in dark corners and large sunlit spaces 

displays the abandoned territory that glows with the aesthetic qualities, 

emanating silence, fixity and a sense of emptied identity. 

In Auster’s book this is the description of the space: “We stepped in 

cautiously and discovered a series of bare, empty rooms. In a small room at 

the back, impeccably clean as all the other rooms were, the red notebook 

was lying on the floor” (Auster, 2004, p. 133). Not only the room or 

apartment, the whole city radiates inertia, snow erasing all boundaries. “The 

city was entirely white now, and the snow kept falling, as though it would 

never end” (ibid.). The unifying effect of whiteness constructs the blank 

world, the story ends, consummating its own potential – similarly to the lightwashed 

spaces in Hopper’s paintings. “As for Auster, I am convinced that he 

behaved badly throughout. If our friendship has ended, he has only himself to 

blame. As for me, my thoughts remain with Quinn. He will be with me always. 

And wherever he may have disappeared to, I wish him luck” (ibid.). 

The presentation of the new world, with a new ontology, not as the end of 

the story but as an end of a story, is central to DeLillo’s novel of 2007 Falling 

Man. Here, the urban setting is New York as well, but New York radically 

38

changed after the collapse of the twin towers. It starts with the moment of 

the aftermath and in a way thus counteracts Aster’s novel Brooklyn Follies 

(2005). Aster’s novel ends with the attack on the World Trade Centre giving a 

wholly different twist to misshape adventures, and the troubles of the 

protagonist and his friends. If the stories the narrator retells throughout were 

just follies at the end, after the twin tower collapse their actors become folly 

artists, merely “special effects” in a larger project that someone else directs. 

This is also the point of departure for DeLillo’s powerful novel. Beginning 

with the well known images from television, DeLillo’s narrative gives them to 

us once again in a literary form: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a 

time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through 

rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their 

jackets or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their 

mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, 

running past him. They ran and fell, some of them confused and ungainly, 

with debris coming down around them, […] The roar was still in the air, the 

buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now” (2007, p. 3). 

The novel’s central theme is similar to the one in the cult novel of the post 

WWI period The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway. Both deal with 

the trauma and the new world that is constituted as a result of it. The central 

theme thus remains: if this is the world, then how to live in it. Or, on a more 

personal level, if this is my experience, then how to live with it. Don DeLillo 

develops this central line in a wonderfully elaborate, multi-voiced novel 

presented in the recurrent image suggested already by its title and the 

introductory paragraph. How many times does the word ‘fall’ recur and what 

image does it help to establish? 

DeLillo’s text works against images that have been implanted in our minds 

via television. It is probably hard to find anyone of a certain age who, having 

watched the television broadcasts, would not have had the images of the 

horror of that day emblazoned in their minds. Images speak louder than 

words and can be easily evoked under various circumstances. DeLillo creates 

the narrative that starts with the description of the very same images he 

assumes the minds of his readers had already absorbed, however, he forces 

the reader to reinvent them again, relive them in the configuration of words 

he meticulously selects. 

The recurrent word ‘fall’ underlines the effect of the phrase falling man. In 

the novel, a performance artist known as a falling man appears dangling from 

39

a balcony, rooftop, inside of a concert hall. “He’d appeared several times in 

the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one 

or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress 

shoes” (DeLillo, 2007, p. 28). 

Let us consider in this context a photograph by Gregory Crewdson from 

the Dream House series, called Ophelia. When we look at the picture from a 

distance, when our eye still does not focus on details, and does not recognise 

them, what we see is a large floating figure in the centre of the picture which 

seems as if levitating. The details of the background which our eyes are still 

not able to process rationally in the first moments support this reading. The 

liquid surface of the “carpet” in the room appears to be rather solid, as if 

moving in depth, going down, extending the space of the room, and what in 

fact are the reflections of room details, windows, slit holes in the door, lamps 

upside down, create an illusion of yet another background, slightly darker 

than the upper part of the picture. Due to this illusory effect, in a stage that 

precedes the rational interpretation of the signs within the picture opens to 

the gaze of the viewer a floating body, weightless, as if resting in an unusual 

position, barren of all the burdens of everyday life. 

The falling man in Don DeLillo’s novel “brought it back of course, those 

stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to 

jump” (ibid.). The reader receives the perspective of the falling man through 

a single character Lianne, a wife of a man saved from the Towers. “There was 

the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure 

that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all” (ibid.). The body 

overcoming the limits of gravitation in the novel is only an illusion, similar to 

our surface reading of Crewdson’s photography. It is integrated into the 

urban space in order to disturb, to bring memories back. Its recurrence in the 

novel turns it into a stylised element incorporated into its surroundings, in 

spite of the absurd reality it recalls. In the real world, during the real events 

of 9/11, there were people jumping from the towers to escape the dread of 

fire and explosions only to let their bodies float in the air to the ultimate end. 

There is also a photograph, a media image, which forever fixed the levitating 

body of one of the victims. The novel perpetuates the image and together 

with it the sense of derealisation of reality. As one of the characters has it in 

the novel: 

“When you see something happening, it’s supposed to be real.” 

“You’re looking right at it. But it’s not really happening” (ibid., p. 63). 

40

What is the imaginary Eden for today’s troubled mind in an over 

technologised world? How to integrate in our lives the moments of 

existential rupture we are unable to prevent? The examples across time, 

media and style posit that the metaphysical certainties are no longer viable. 

There are no imaginative Edens; there remain only the surface realities. In 

the abovementioned works of art, the human and urban landscapes recur as 

realistic settings to generate the bond between the body and environment. 

What comes out of it is the uneasy, disturbing relationship where body is 

absorbed, immersed into the landscape. The tension brings forth the 

realisation that the boundary between live and artificial organisms has been 

thoroughly breached as well as the borderline between the real and 

simulated. The “American” urban landscape is the progress that does not 

move. It remains fixed, immobile, embracing even live organisms, whose 

function undermines the traditional hierarchy of live over artificial, animate 

over inanimate. The mind, the index of the human, remains perceiving. But 

what remains are only sets of unrelated presents, a kind of schizophrenia, 

which Jameson talks about, situated in the “technological sublime” (Jameson, 

1991, p. 37). 

References 

Auster, P. 1987. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin 

Books. 

Auster, P. 2005. The Brooklyn Follies. London: Faber and Faber. 

Benesch, K., Schmidt, K. (eds.). 2005. Space in America: Theory, History, 

Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Questia, Web, 30 July 2010. 

Berg, S. 2006. Abysmal Dreams. European Photography, 27, no79/80, pp. 24- 

31. Copyright 1982-2006. The H.W. Wilson Company. 

Curti, M. 2004. The Growth of American Thought. New Brunswick: 

Transaction Publishers. 

DeLillo, D. 1998. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books. 

DeLillo, D. 2007. Falling Man. New York: Scribner. 

Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 

Durham: Duke University Press. 

Levi, G. 1995. Edward Hopper. An Intimate Biography. Berkeley and Los 

Angeles: University of California Press. 

Poe, E. A. 1847. The Domain of Arnheim. Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s 

Magazine. 

41

Literature and Culture: the British Perspective 


The immigrant is the Everyman of the twentieth century. 

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia 

Culture in transition 

For centuries, people have felt the need to express their opinion on things 

and events happening around them and to them. The urge to demonstrate 

and locate their own position in the spatial and temporal dimension naturally 

led to the process of documenting these events in various forms and by 

various media. Imaginative literature, penetrating under the surface of mere 

fact and documentary, proves to be one of the most vital tools to reflect the 

happenings around us. In the words of Philip Tew, “[n]ovels both rationalize 

and engage dialectically with our historical presence, playing their part, 

however provisionally at times, in our understanding of and reflection upon 

our lives” (2007, p. 7). Moreover, as Tew argues, “[t]o cite history and critical 

longevity as offering the only correct or worthwhile arbitration of literary 

worth […] is at best questionable and certainly naïve” (ibid., p. 15). Novels 

thus rightfully have a say in documenting and mirroring realities of societies 

all around the world. 

From the 1950s onwards, Great Britain has witnessed crucial social and 

political transformations, altering the everyday reality to such an extent that 

many scholars mark this period (culminating in the 1970s) as a “watershed 

and a period of fundamental change […], that in retrospect can be seen to 

rival and not be simply an extension of the changes brought about by the end 

of the Second World War” 10 (ibid., p. 16). In the view of many scholars, it is 

precisely the period of the 1950s that ensured that Britain would become a 

multicultural society (Hansel, 2000, p. 19). Leaving domestic political issues 

aside, decolonisation, subsequent migration waves and several series of 

diaspora represent the most significant factors altering the face of British 

10 Similarly, Nick Bentley defines the period of the mid- to late 70s as a period of social and 

cultural change that divides some of the fundamental characteristics of contemporary 

Britain from the end of the Second World War onwards (2008, p. 2). 

42

society in a profound way. “The legacy of colonialism has been one of the 

most far reaching influences both on the former colonies and also on Britain 

itself, both in terms of its position in the new world order after 1945, and also 

in the changing nature of its home population” 11 (Bentley, 2008, p. 17). 

Considering that post-war migration to Great Britain was, at that time, 

opposed by the majority of the British public, which demanded strict 

migration control, Britain came a long way to accept its multicultural face 12 . 

Randall Hansel, a political scientist and historian, mentions several studies of 

Commonwealth migration which state that by introducing migration 

restrictions in the 1950s, the British government built them around “a 

racialized reconstruction of ‘Britishness’ in which to be white was to belong 

and to be black was to be excluded” 13 (2000, p. 11). Yet, as Hansel claims, 

most of these studies are one-sided, since British policy to migration from 

1948 to 1962 was one of the most liberal in the world “granting citizenship to 

hundreds of millions colonial subjects across the globe” (ibid., p. 16). It is 

true, however, that the 1960s saw one of the strictest migration policies in 

the history of Britain. 

Cutting a long story short, throughout the second half of the twentieth 

century, Britain has been undoubtedly transformed into a multicultural 

society, with immigrant communities being established all around the 

country. According to Niall Ferguson, more than a million people from all 

over Britain’s former Empire have come as immigrants to Britain (2004, p. 54) 

and that is why postcolonialism becomes one of the crucial discourses in any 

analysis of the current social context in Britain. Necessarily, the processes of 

mass migration, globalisation, and transnationalisation have produced “a 

multiplicity of cultural interconnections which cannot be reconciled with the 

11 In 1993, in his ground-breaking book Culture and Imperialism Edward W. Said noted that it is 

“one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, 

displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history” (1994, p. 332). Said grounds this 

fact in the afterthoughts of postcolonial and imperial conflicts which resulted in “unhoused, 

decentered, and exilic energies” whose “incarnation today is the migrant” (Ibid.). The 

mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale has been consolidated by imperialism 

(Ibid., p. 336) and the declining British Empire could not avoid its consequences. 

12 However, to assume that the pre-war era was characterized by a homogeneous culture 

determined by a fixed British identity would be misleading and naïve. 

13 The prolific British author, Caryl Phillips, also argues that “[a]cross the centuries British 

identity has been a primarily racially constructed concept” (2001, p. 272), mentioning the 

example of Caribbean migration to Britain. 

43

traditional notion of cultures seen in national or ethnic terms” (Brancato, 

2009, p. 51). Moreover, as Brancato claims, even ideologies such as 

multiculturalism and interculturalism fail to grasp the complexity of the 

cultural dynamics shaping modern subjectivities which are inevitably marked 

by “migrancy, diasporic and transnational networks, and various forms of 

cosmopolitanism” (ibid.). Since they tend to focus predominantly on 

differences, they only succeed in producing and maintaining polarities. 

Therefore, new concepts have been sought to generate a better 

understanding of the intricate nature of dynamic cultural development, and 

transculturality, a concept elaborated by Wolfgang Welsh, seems to be one 

that some groups of scholars prefer to others. The concept of 

transculturality, “as an analytical model for the decoding of contemporary 

cultural reality”, thus starts from “the intersection rather than from 

differences and polarities [and] offers the possibility of a deeper 

understanding of complex cultural processes” (ibid., p. 53). As Sabrina 

Brancato explains, the transcultural paradigm goes “a step further in grasping 

the complexity of cultural interaction, emphasizing the permeability and 

dynamism of identity as a continuous negotiation” (ibid., p. 54). 

Responses to these changing social and cultural conditions in Great 

Britain, and, subsequently, a direct experience of migrants within the 

framework of diaspora, and the diverse realities of their lives, are all 

recorded and processed not only in social, political or historical studies, but in 

fiction as well. Obviously, as Britain’s demographic map changed notably so 

did the representative sample of its literary scene which has become more 

multicultural and ethnically diverse both in authors and subject matter (Tew, 

2007, p. 15). Naturally, British literature reacted to all these changes since it 

“has been a cultural space in which the experiences of immigrants and 

broader political issues associated with these experiences have been 

articulated” (Bentley, 2008, p. 18). As Philip Tew in his book The 

Contemporary British Novel suggests, a new wave of British writing emerged 

from the mid-1970s foregrounding such themes, among others, as British 

identity, hybridity and the explicit notion of a culture in transition (2007, p. 

1). 

In 1981, William Q. Boelhower attempted to define the particularities of 

the immigrant novel as a genre. He came up with the following 

macrostructure where the Old World and New World represent the “poles of 

tension” (Boelhower, 1981, p. 5). According to Boelhower, immigrants enter 

44

the New World with certain sets of expectations which idealise the New 

World, while the Old one is viewed solely in negative terms. Yet, as they 

move along the contact axis, the vision of the New World (NW) is gradually 

modified and disposed of its ideal attributes. In this process, the immigrant is 

separated from the Old World (OW) which is thus idealised as well “either 

through an attempt to preserve his OW culture, even though he may be 

assimilated into the NW, or through a stiff criticism of an alienating set of 

experiences” in the new place (ibid.). 

(Boelhower, 1981, p. 5) 

Several decades later, these topics still pervade literary discussions and prove 

to be a bountiful source of material for fiction writers, such as Zadie Smith, 

Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Diran Adebayo, Sunetra Gupta or Romesh 

Gunesekera to name just a few. Contemporary British literature abounds in 

stories set among immigrant communities, depicting their internal 

mechanisms and tensions, and in multicultural metropolitan centres 

examining their potential for mutual coexistence. Naturally, there has been a 

significant development in the thematic processing of immigrant experience 

over the last decades. As the social and political conditions of immigrants 

kept changing and their position in the new mother country kept evolving, so 

did the problems they were facing. Initially, many novels focused on the 

anguish and initial difficulties of first-generation migrants as they were trying 

to settle down in a completely new environment and were struggling with a 

new culture. Gradually, stories of second-generation migrants started to 

45

occupy the central space in the fictionalised worlds as the children of 

immigrants attempted to cross the borders from the periphery to the centre. 

However, multicultural settings of Western towns and cities are no longer 

viewed as something exotic and new; their multi-ethnic local colour has 

transformed the way people look at former immigrants and their 

descendants. 

Of course, such depictions of social and literary transitions and changes are 

more than simplified and imperfect. Yet, there are certain tendencies in 

recent literary developments supporting this rough outline and the next 

sections of this chapter will attempt to demonstrate this point. Nonetheless, 

the theme of identity and cultural negotiations in a multicultural context 

represent some of the most discussed issues in contemporary literature. 

The Stigma of Arrival: Life Within the Community 

The decision to travel to a foreign country with the intention of settling 

there permanently has been made by millions of people worldwide for all 

possible reasons. Most of them have experienced the anguish of arriving in a 

foreign place, not knowing anyone, not speaking the language of the country 

and struggling with different cultural practices. The significance of a 

community of people sharing a similar experience, or similar cultural 

background, seems to be priceless in this context. As Suzan Ilcan claims, 

“[f]or people living within the tensions and consequences of globalization, 

deterritorialization, and mass migratory movements, ‘belonging’ to a place, a 

home, or a people becomes not so much an insulated or individual affair as 

an experience of being within and in-between sets of social relations” (2002, 

p. 2). The role of the community and its working mechanisms has been 

captured in numerous works of fiction. 

Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane, situated in London’s Bangladeshi 

neighbourhood, portrays the struggles of a shy, but perceptive, eighteenyear-old 

girl Nazneen who moved to Great Britain with her self-centred and 

ambitious husband Chanu. The novel processes all the events through 

Nazneen’s perspective; thus, the narrative strategy employed simply invites 

readers to step into the mind of an estranged and lonely young woman who 

is totally dependent on her new husband (chosen by her father, naturally) 

and finds herself living in a completely different culture. The linguistic barrier 

only aggravates Nazneen’s isolation and powerlessness, foregrounding her 

cultural otherness. Nazneen’s feeling of isolation culminates after Chanu 

46

leaves for work and she is left home alone among “the muffled sounds of 

private lives sealed away above, below and around her” (Ali, 2003, p. 18). 

“What she missed most was people. Not any people in particular […] but just 

people. If she put her ear to the wall she could hear sounds. The television 

was on. Coughing. Sometimes the lavatory flushing. Someone upstairs 

scraping a chair. A shouting match below. Everyone in their boxes, counting 

their possessions” (ibid.). 

Moreover, the brick walls surrounding her physically seem impenetrable 

to Nazneen. Looking at the walls as a medium which materialises her 

isolation from the outer world and her inability to escape (be it from her 

husband or England in general), a symbolical understanding of the setting 

may be discovered. “You can spread your soul over a paddy field, you can 

whisper to a mango tree, you can feel the earth beneath your toes and know 

that this is the place, the place where it begins and ends. But what can you 

tell to a pile of bricks? The bricks will not be moved.” (ibid., p. 70). Nazneen 

has to cope with “a high level of uncertainty and unfamiliarity within the new 

culture and also finds herself facing the task of acquiring the necessary 

competence to function satisfactorily, even if that is only at the minimum 

level” (Hussain, 2005, p. 94). 

Being unable to communicate with other Londoners, Nazneen’s life is 

understandably confined to the limited space of her own community and 

other Bangladeshi sojourners inhabiting the shabby East End apartment 

blocks. Tower Hamlets is meant to reconstruct the feeling of home amidst 

the anonymous English capital, with saris hanging from the windows, shops 

“stacked with kebabs, tandoori chickens, bhazis, puris, trays of rice and 

vegetables, milky sweets, sugar-shined ladoos, the faintly sparkling jelabees” 

(ibid., p. 398), men in “white panjabi-pyjama and skullcaps” (ibid., p. 13) and 

women wearing hijab and burkha. Yet not everything Nazneen sees is 

welcoming and flattering. There are also dogs defecating on the grass, “the 

smell from the overflowing communal bins” (ibid.), drugs, ghettos, and 

greedy moneylenders. 

Brick Lane, in fact, represents “a holding area, a temporary zone for 

immigrants who have not yet fully settled in England [and] whose lives are 

defined by the past” (Hussain, 2005, p. 102). As Chanu explains: “They all 

stick together because they come from the same district. They know each 

other from the villages, and they come to Tower Hamlets and they think they 

are back in the village” (Ali, 2003, p. 21). In fact, “[t]hey don’t ever really 

47

leave home. Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there. And 

anyway, look how they live: just recreating the villages here” (ibid., p. 24). 

Slowly, Nazneen makes friends with other women neighbours, such as Razia 

Iqbal and integrates into the community which reminds her at least a bit of 

her home back in Bangladesh of which she contemplates with nostalgia and 

melancholy. 

Chanu, unlike Nazneen, is presented as one who knows how to live in the 

Western world. He speaks the language of the country he settled in, he has a 

stable job and he has also made few friendships and acquaintances. In his 

own words, he considers himself westernised by now. However, having come 

to London with high hopes and dreams, Chanu’s assumptions about the life 

of a foreigner in the West were soon supplanted by the harsh reality he had 

to face. “When I came I was a young man. I had ambitions. Big dreams. When 

I got off the aeroplane I had my degree certificate in my suitcase and a few 

pounds in my pocket. I thought there would be a red carpet laid out for me. I 

was going to join the Civil Service and become Private Secretary to the Prime 

Minister. […] That was my plan. And then I found things were a bit different. 

These people here didn’t know the difference between me, who stepped off 

an aeroplane with a degree certificate, and the peasants who jumped off the 

boat possessing only the lice on their heads” (ibid., p. 26). 

The character of Chanu is, in fact, a tragicomic one since he embodies all 

the ambitions and frustrations of an immigrant. The huge piles of Chanu’s 

useless certificates and diplomas which should secure his promotion only 

demonstrate his self-deluding desire to succeed in the Western world in 

which he wishes to be acknowledged as an equal partner. His eloquent 

theories regarding social, political, cultural or artistic issues are supposed to 

manifest his intellectualism; but it is his observant and passive wife Nazneen 

that seems to be a better judge of human character and who seems to 

understand the futility of her husband’s attempts. In the end, it is Nazneen 

who has gained a better understanding of the Western way of life than 

Chanu. 

As Nazneen proceeds on her path of (self-)discovery, the novel offers a 

valuable insight into how this perceptive young woman views the events and 

places around her. The employed narrative technique, focusing on Nazneen’s 

viewpoint predominantly, enables the writer to record her impressions of 

London and its inhabitants as she sees them soon after her arrival. Suddenly, 

the invisible foreigner holds a mirror to the busy society of Londoners and 

48

the topography of their city. The reader becomes a fellow tourist 

accompanying Nazneen on her adventurous outing through London’s streets 

which are “stacked with rubbish, entire kingdoms of rubbish piled high as 

fortresses with only the border skirmishes of plastic bottles and greasestained 

cardboard to separate them” (ibid., p. 43). She cranes her head back 

as she looks at “white stone palaces” and discovers buildings “without end”, 

crushing the clouds (ibid., p. 44). Then, realising that people do not notice her 

at all, Nazneen starts to scrutinise “the long, thin faces, the pointy chins” 

(ibid., p. 45) and passing women who “pressed their lips together and 

narrowed their eyes as though they were angry at something they had heard, 

or at the wind for messing their hair” (ibid.). “Men in dark suits trotted briskly 

up and down the steps […] They barked to each other and nodded sombrely” 

(ibid., p. 44). “Every person who brushed past her on the pavement, every 

back she saw, was on a private, urgent mission to execute a precise and 

demanding plan: to get a promotion today, to be exactly on time for an 

appointment, to buy a newspaper with the right coins so that the exchange 

was swift and seamless, to walk without wasting a second and to reach the 

roadside just as the lights turned red” (idid., pp. 44-45). 

Nazneen’s observations not only provide some insight into how foreigners 

might view Western metropolises and their citizens, but also point to her 

own stance towards this urban space. It is clear that Nazneen does not feel 

part of the city, nor can she identify with the people passing by her. In the 

words of Paul Newland, “she can only view the city through the imaginative 

prism of her distant birthplace” and that is why “Nazneen’s movement 

through this ‘Other’ territory, then, remains the movement of an immigrant 

drifting through an alien, unknown space” (2008, p. 245). The feeling of 

unbelonging pervades all these lines and is diminished, paradoxically, only 

when Nazneen returns to the brick walls of her apartment. 

Yet, Nazneen’s story is a story of gradual self-awakening. The novel 

“tracks the process by which she moves, fitfully and self-laceratingly, from 

shame to tentative self-possession, from a willing submission to a belief in 

her own agency, from a silence both voluntary and culturally conditioned to a 

yell of liberation” (Sandhu, 2003). By joining the local sewing business, she 

not only steps a little closer to her independence but affirms her decision to 

become an active, equally productive family member. Thus, Nazneen 

becomes acquainted with Karim, a young, idealistic Muslim whose visions 

prove to be too fragile to be realised, and who later becomes her lover. It is 

49

through him that Nazneen penetrates into the politically active core of the 

Muslim community and observes the petty micro-wars between different 

political camps. 

As Yasmin Hussain claims in her Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, 

Culture and Ethnicity, the Bangladeshi community in England is presented by 

Ali in “negative, atavistic terms” as “dysfunctionally insular and traditional, 

riven by internal dissent and unable to organise itself even in the face of 

racist mobilisations” (2005, p. 93). Karim, the leader of the Bengal Tigers, 

establishes a tradition in organising regular meetings of the local Muslim 

community and thus attempts to play a small role at least in improving the 

conditions of the people living in the neighbourhood. The political 

programme of his group seems perfunctory at the beginning. However, the 

aftermath of 9/11, escalating into a heated atmosphere on the local estate, 

suddenly provides an agenda. Yet, the leaflet war between the Bengal Tigers 

and its counterpart, the Lion Hearts, only succeeds in igniting ethnocentric 

and xenophobic passions and totally fails to complete its original mission 14 . 

Karim, as many inhabitants of Tower Hamlets of his age group, has never 

been to Bangladesh and therefore was “born a foreigner” who stammered 

when speaking in Bengali (Ali, 2003, p. 375). Looking at him, Nazneen could 

“see only his possibilities” and that “the disappointments of his life, which 

would shape him, had yet to happen” (ibid.). Not having a place in the world, 

he was desperately defending the only one he knew. As the post 9/11 

situation starts to heat up, Karim’s gold necklace, jeans, shirts and trainers 

disappear and are supplanted by a panjabi-pyjama and a skullcap in an 

ostentatious public demonstration of cultural identification. The street 

disturbances and riots among competing activist gangs suddenly transform 

Brick Lane into a battle zone. “In the middle of the road, a coiled snake of 

tyres flamed with acrid fury and shed skins, thick, black, choking, to the wind. 

Shop alarms rang, clang, clang, clang, more frightened than warning. Back up 

the road, an ambulance crawled stubbornly along, its twirling blue eyes 

sending out a terrible, keening lament” (ibid., p. 396). 

14 Interestingly, the attempts to adapt the novel into a film version in 2006 were accompanied 

by intense protests by the local Bangladeshi minority which struggled against what they 

perceived as a negativistic portrayal of their community in the book. The Greater Sylhet 

Development and Welfare Council wrote an 18-page letter to the author claiming that she 

misrepresents the Bangladeshi community, branding her novel as a despicable insult. 

50

It is also this changing climate of cultural hostility, along with his inability 

to succeed in the Western world, which hastens Chanu’s decision to leave 

London and return to Dhaka. Yet Nazneen’s longing for home has faltered 

with time. As she gradually realises, the picture of home that she had 

cherished all those years living abroad, must have been significantly impacted 

by her absence. “The village was leaving her. Sometimes a picture would 

come. Vivid; so strong she could smell it. More often, she tried to see and 

could not” (ibid., p. 179). She feels this country has changed her, shaped her 

and she is not the girl “from the village any more” (ibid., p. 320). The decision 

to stay in England with her daughters, articulated with a resolute declaration 

“I will decide what to do. I will say what happens to me. I will be the one.” 

(ibid., p. 337), represents the culmination of Nazneen’s self-empowerment. 

Paradoxically, the much despised London from the beginning of her journey 

has become her new home in the end. 

Reaching Outside: A Journey from the Periphery to the Centre 

However, life within an immigrant community does not necessarily 

guarantee eternal contentment and stability. Many inhabitants view it only 

as a transition space and sooner or later move in some other direction. Such 

a tendency is especially obvious in the case of second-generation migrants 

who struggle with a conflicting position within the society, feeling a full part 

of neither section. The conflict between first and second-generation migrants 

is portrayed in Monica Ali’s novel as well. Nazneen has to deal with her 

teenage daughter Shahana who is in constant struggle with her father Chanu. 

Refusing to leave England, which she regards as her true home, Shahana is 

one of the reasons why Nazneen decides not to return back to Bangladesh 

with her husband at the end of the novel. Similarly, Hanif Kureishi’s novel The 

Buddha of Suburbia, published in 1990, presents a story of a young man who 

attempts to break through the protective membrane of a familiar place in 

order to get plunged into the unknown, yet desired metropolis. 

The protagonist of the novel is the seventeen-year-old Karim Amir, son of 

an Indian-born immigrant, Haroon, and his English wife, Margaret (whom he 

later exchanges for another Englishwoman), living in suburban London. 

Karim’s story is a story of a journey and a story of border-crossing, both 

across the city’s invisible frontier, separating the periphery from the centre, 

51

and across the cultural spectrum of Britain’s changing demography 15 . The 

novel’s formal division into two sections – entitled ‘In the Suburbs’ and ‘In 

the city’ – represents a distinct demarcation line Karim intends to cross in 

order to blend with the centre. 

Karim’s opening statement, an obvious attempt at self-characterisation 

which points to his identity confusion, clearly anticipates the upcoming 

problems he will necessarily face later on. Moreover, it also demonstrates 

the perplexing reaction of English society towards the descendants of 

immigrants which is obviously not ready to view them as its valid members 16 . 

In the words of Nahem Yousaf, Hanif Kureishi’s novel “uncovers many of the 

ironies that underlie our recognition of Britain as a multicultural society and 

of Britons as racially diverse and culturally heterogeneous citizens” (2002, p. 

27). The very concept of Englishness is reconsidered and redefined by 

Kureishi in this tale of identity, belonging and cultural affiliation. “My name is 

Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often 

considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having 

emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am (though 

not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. 

Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of 

belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored” (Kureishi, 1990, 

p. 3, emphasis added). 

Karim’s peregrination from suburbia to the city centre mirrors an 

imaginary trajectory from his community to white English society. Karim’s 

identity within the community seems to be fixed, stable, at least in the view 

of his relatives and friends; yet Karim is aware of a certain split within himself 

which is also demonstrated by that seemingly accidental “almost” in his 

introduction. This simple word, alluding to an incompleteness of some sort, 

will accompany him all along his way preventing him from achieving his 

original goal, i.e. to merge with the Englishmen in the hub. 

Hanif Kureishi is well acquainted with the problems stemming from having 

a culturally mixed background since he is, like his creation Karim Amir, a 

product of an interracial marriage (he has a Pakistani father and an English 

15 The novel is set precisely in the era of the 1970s, a period of crucial political and cultural 

changes in Great Britain, which are described in the introductory section of this chapter. 

16 “Yeah, sometimes we were French, Jammie and I, and other times we went black American. 

The thing was, we were supposed to be English, but to the English we were always wogs and 

nigs and Pakis and the rest of it” (Kureishi, 1990, p. 53). 

52

mother). So as Karim’s identity is challenged by his surrounding and 

questioned by himself, Kureishi, who experienced a similar phase of selfdenial 

and identity crisis, knows very well what he is going through: “From 

the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I 

wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else. I read with 

understanding a story in a newspaper about a black boy who, when he 

noticed that burnt skin turned white, jumped into a bath of boiling water […] 

I found it almost impossible to answer questions about where I came from. 

The word ‘Pakistani’ had been made into an insult. It was a word I didn’t 

want used about myself. I couldn’t tolerate being myself” (Kureishi, 1986, p. 

15, 18). 

Throughout the story, Karim yearns for self-realisation and change and he 

finally finds them in the world of London theatre. His original enthusiasm, 

when cast into an experimental adaptation of Kipling’s Jungle Book, is soon 

supplanted by self-doubt and even bigger confusion. As he finds out later, the 

director cast him “for authenticity and not for experience” (ibid., p. 147), yet 

being authentic seems to mean very different things to Karim and the 

director. Karim is suddenly forced to negotiate his identity not only between 

the former binaries (Indian versus English heritage), now, he must consider 

the triple element, i.e. his false stage identity, as well. Ironically, while Karim 

attempts to become part of the centre, he is compelled to act as an exotic 

caricature of himself, foregrounding and intentionally distorting his ethnic 

identity, which seems to be a too visible and differentiable identifier among 

white Englishmen who do not accept him as one of them. The bizarre 

masquerade he is presenting on stage, however, is what the white English 

audience seems to want. 

To a certain extent, Karim’s grotesque performance echoes the tragic fate 

of the American entertainer Bert Williams {of Caribbean origin), fictionalised 

in Caryl Phillip’s novel Dancing in the Dark. In order to gain success and 

entertain the American audience, Williams decided to put on blackface 

makeup and impersonate the Negro as America wanted to see him. The 

show, based on unflattering cultural stereotypes, became a huge success on 

Broadway. Yet Williams, a sensitive and intelligent man, also understood that 

the conflicts between his stage character and his true identity are 

irreconcilable and this realisation has sealed his own tragic fate at the end. 

Likewise, Karim’s exotic looks are presented as an interesting and soughtafter 

commodity which the West longs for in order to break loose from the 

53

quotidian greyness and routine. However, with his impersonations of ethnic 

characters, Karim, like Bert Williams, also contributes to the dissemination of 

false and distorted conceptions of ethnic minorities 17 . One of his co-workers 

confronts him with a passionate outcry which he does not seem to 

understand: “Your picture is what white people already think of us. That 

we’re funny, with strange habits and weird customs. To the white man we’re 

already people without humanity, and then you go and have Anwar madly 

waving sticks at the white boys. I can’t believe that anything like this could 

happen. You show us as unorganized aggressors. Why do you hate yourself 

and all black people so much, Karim?” (ibid., p. 180). 

The problem is that Karim does not see himself pictured in the exotic 

character he is impersonating on stage. While living in suburbia, his 

instinctive distancing from the immigrant community meant that he did not 

perceive himself as a valid member, or as a displaced subject. Nevertheless, 

he does not seem to identify with white Englishmen either. There are several 

passages in the novel where he takes an outsider’s perspective when looking 

at his fellow Londoners. Only later does Karim realise that he feels certain 

togetherness with his people: “But I did feel, looking at these strange 

creatures now – the Indians – that in some way these were my people, and 

that I’d spent my life denying or avoiding that fact. I felt ashamed and 

incomplete at the same time, as if half of me were missing, and as if I’d been 

colluding with my enemies, those whites who wanted Indians to be like 

them” (ibid., p. 212). 

The tension between theatricality and authenticity pervades the whole 

novel and proves to be one of its crucial leitmotivs. In the theatre, Karim is 

required to become “authentically” Indian, which he is obviously not, 

according to the director’s opinion. Therefore, Karim dresses in a funny 

costume, wears makeup and speaks in a weird accent, harvesting a warm 

response from the audience. Similarly, Karim’s father Haroon floats between 

his real self and an invented alter ego. Becoming the Buddha of suburbia 

(after whom the novel is named), Haroon decides to abandon the identity of 

17 “I was playing an immigrant fresh from a small Indian town. I insisted on assembling the 

costume myself: I knew I could do something apt. I wore high white platform boots, wide 

cherry flares that stuck to my arse like sweetpaper and flapped around my ankles, and a 

spotted shirt with a wide ‘Concorde’ collar flattened over my jacket lapels. […] They laughed 

at my jokes, which concerned the sexual ambition and humiliation of an Indian in England” 

(Kureishi, 1990, p. 220). 

54

the former Indian Other which he supplants by a neutral Oriental mask. Thus, 

he is neither Western nor Indian and Karim describes him as “a renegade 

Muslim masquerading as a Buddhist” (ibid., p. 16). Both father and son 

disguise their true selves and decide to live in a world where it is better to 

hide genuineness as if being real and true to oneself would not be enough (or 

good enough). 

This dichotomous splitting of the protagonists’ identities (or rather their 

hybrid nature) is also exemplified by the liminal character of the suburban 

landscape they inhabit. In the words of Marzena Kubisz, “it belongs neither to 

the city nor to the country” (2007, p. 133) just like Karim and his father 

oscillate between Englishness and otherness. London, on the other hand, is 

presented as “a constellation of overlapping spaces which does not legitimize 

traditional boundaries between cultures but it softens them and makes 

multidirectional cultural movement possible” (ibid., p 134). While the 

suburban space seems to be closed and wary of transformation, London’s 

openness and ever-changing nature allows its inhabitants to explore diverse 

areas of life and reinvent their selves every day. Crossing the border between 

these two different spaces thus inevitably leads to constant reconceptualisation 

of the characters’ identities. 

Karim’s constant movement - from suburbia to London, from London to 

New York, from household to household and from one identity to another - is 

finally rewarded by recognition of cultural contiguity. Throughout the story, 

Karim performs different identities and can be described as an elusive 

character that escapes characterization and “becomes almost other to 

himself in a chameleon-like process of role-playing in a series of shifting 

relations with people he sometimes seems to love and sometimes not” 

(Brancato, 2009, p. 56). Paradoxically, it is in the community that he sought 

to avoid and escape from, that he finds a way back to his roots, starts to 

regard other Indians as his fellows and seems to accept both parts of his 

cultural heritage as an inseparable part of his personality. 

Multicultural Symbiosis: Zadie Smith’s Visionary World 

Contemporary British authors tend to initiate a mutual dialogue between 

different cultures, portraying various forms and possibilities of their 

cohabitations. A lot of them seem to acknowledge and accept hybridity and 

multiculturalism as practices of everyday life, not as something extraordinary 

55

or unusual. According to Laura Moss, that might be because “the current 

state of globalisation, diasporic migration, and contemporary 

cosmopolitanism has brought about a ‘normalisation’ of hybridity in 

contemporary postcolonial communities” (2003, p. 12). In this context, one 

must inevitably come across the young and talented writer Zadie Smith and 

her phenomenal debut novel White Teeth. Smith’s book not only captures all 

the struggles of first-generation immigrants in modern multi-Britain, it also 

provides a glimpse into the future by embracing the destinies of their 

children as well. White Teeth may be viewed as a form of family and (at the 

same time) cultural saga, depicting “three cultures and three families over 

three generations” (back cover, 2000). Smith brings together Bangladeshi 

immigrants fixated on their homeland, culture and religion with British liberal 

intellectuals, devout Jehovah’s Witnesses inextricably linked with Islamic 

fundamentalists and Animal Rights activists and creates a multiracial, 

multicultural and multireligious orchestra. 

Smith, brought up and still living in multicultural London, seems to belong 

to a new wave of literary voices that do not see ethnicity or hybridity as a 

problem, but rather as a part of one’s everyday reality. In one interview, 

when asked how she tried to approach multiracial London, the writer 

answers: “I was just trying to approach London. I don’t think of it as a theme, 

or even a significant thing about the city. This is what modern life is like. If I 

were to write a book about London in which there were only white people, I 

think that would be kind of bizarre” (Smith). Similarly, her character Alsana 

explains in White Teeth that it is time to acknowledge hybridity as a common 

denominator of Englishness: “[…] you go back and back and back and it’s still 

easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure 

faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a 

fairy-tale!” (Smith, 2000, p. 236). 

The world that Smith’s characters inhabit is a world of diversity and 

plurality. It is a world of multicultural symbiosis (though it is not always 

unproblematic) that is captured in one of the most quoted passage from the 

novel: “This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This 

has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in 

the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish 

pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a 

basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names 

56

on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, 

cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks” (ibid., p. 326). 

The book is centred on a lifelong bond between Samad Iqbal, a firstgeneration 

Bangladeshi immigrant, and Archie Jones, a simple and unworldly 

Englishman who has, after a failed suicide attempt, married a black Jamaican- 

English woman. This unusual and precious friendship, together with Archie’s 

interracial marriage, provide a unique opportunity to demonstrate that 

diversity and difference can live together side-by-side. Smith, of course, does 

not delineate an ideal image of society, since both Archie and Samad have to 

face and come to terms with a deep seated racism (and their life-long 

friendship is not devoid of some ups and downs either). The novel simply 

captures quotidian multicultural reality without putting an idealistic veil over 

it. 

Moreover, Smith follows the paths of the protagonists’ children, as well, 

thus providing a different perspective on life in a multicultural British 

metropolis. As Marcus Chalfen, the middle-class scientist, and Magid’s 

(Samad’s son) patron, implies, “first generation are all loony tunes, but the 

second generation have got heads just about straight on their shoulders” 

(Smith, 2000, p. 349). Samad’s identity stems predominantly from his pride 

in, and devotion to, his roots (personified by his ‘famous’ great-grandfather 

Mangal Pande whom he believes to be a hero of the Indian Mutiny) and he is 

not willing to accept his children’s integration, that is to say, assimilation in 

the host culture. He and his wife Alsana represent the vulnerability and the 

in-betweenness of their generation who hold everything that is English or 

Western in contempt. 

In contrast, Samad’s twins, Magid and Millat, and Archie’s daughter Irie in 

particular, desire to merge with the non-hyphenated and shake off the 

historical burden from their shoulders. Each of them, however, tries to come 

into terms with his or her roots differently. Laying hopes on a tough decision 

he had to make, Samad sends Magid, the brainy one of the twins, back to 

Bangladesh in order to get a rigorous and proper Bengalese education in his 

motherland. What a surprise it must have been to Samad when, eight years 

later, Magid returns home and instead of being a devout and proud Bengali 

Muslim, he is more English than the English (as one of the chapter titles 

goes). The trouble-maker Millat, on the other hand, who remained in London, 

drifts into a group of Islamic fundamentalists and proves to be another 

disappointment for his disillusioned father. Despite the fact that none of his 

57

sons had fulfilled Samad’s expectations, they both grow up and seem to live a 

life according to their beliefs; both of them being integrated into the British 

culture. 

In her passionate outbursts, Irie often communicates her vision of the 

future “when roots won’t matter any more because they can’t because they 

mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too tortuous and they’re just 

buried too damn deep” (ibid., p. 527). Moreover, Irie’s desire to interdigitate 

with the Western population results not only in the disastrous straightening 

of her unbending hair, but also causes the alienation from her own family 

when she seeks refuge from the Chalfens. “She wanted it; she wanted to 

merge with the Chalfens, to be of one flesh; separated from the chaotic, 

random flesh of her own family and transgenically fused with another. A 

unique animal. A new breed” (ibid., p. 342). 

Actually, Smith plays an intricate game with her readers who, in fact, have 

the chance to observe the genesis of a unique animal, the FutureMouse that 

is a product of genetic mutation. Paradoxically, this concept, crossing the 

borders both of genetics and ethics, is a part of a courageous but publicly 

condemned cancer project of Marcus Chalfen. The mouse, similarly to Irie, 

Samad, his sons and basically every immigrant character in the novel, 

represents a hybrid. The fact that it is artificially engineered may serve as a 

clear parallel to the aforementioned individuals whose identity happens to be 

“culturally engineered” (Head, 2003, p. 117). 

In order to persuade the public that this experiment is harmless and after 

all beneficial for everyone, Marcus decides to put the mouse in a cage and 

ostentatiously display its otherness in public so that everyone can watch its 

evolution. However, during the final apocalyptic scene, mingling “lust-filled 

Animal Rights lobbyists, stoned Muslim militants, octogenarian Jehovah’s 

Witnesses, self-aggrandising war vets, media-savy scientists, and 

dysfunctional family members” (Moss, 2003, p. 15), the mouse sets itself free 

and runs away to a (hopefully) promising future where no one will ever doubt 

its significance and worth. The book thus closes with a hint of hope - the 

hybrid creature escaping the omnipresent gaze of an unwanted audience and 

disappearing into anonymity. 

Last but not least, White Teeth typifies a unique seriocomic tone which 

pervades the whole narrative and which also demonstrates Smith’s liberation 

from her nostalgic, melancholic and serious literary predecessors. The author 

has argued that “there has been an incredible rash of solemn fiction in the 

58

late eighties and nineties” (Smith) and that she wanted to write something 

that would make her readers laugh. Indeed, it seems to be extremely difficult 

to shake the right portion of humour, satire and esteem in order to produce a 

literary cocktail that would celebrate diversity but also point at the bitter, 

sometimes even bizarre, situations that spring from the weighty parts of our 

history. 

In conclusion, White Teeth may be added to the large number of 

contemporary British books which seek to address the perplexing reality of 

multicultural societies. The text abounds with examples of confusion, a sense 

of exile and alienation which manifest Smith’s lingering awareness of the 

perturbation of immigrant communities. Yet, at the same time, the novel also 

displays the germination of a new era, the first contours of what might 

become the near future by indicating that the “old categories of race are an 

inaccurate way of describing the ethnic diversity of contemporary England” 

(Bentley, 2008, p. 53). Certainly, literature contributes significantly to 

constituting and raising cultural awareness and starting changes in public 

thinking. 

References 

Ali, M. 2003. Brick Lane. London: Doubleday. 

Bentley, N. 2008. Contemporary British Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh 

University Press. 

Boelhower, W. Q. 1981. The Immigrant Novel as a Genre. In: MELUS, Vol. 8, 

No. 1, Tension and Form (Spring, 1981), pp. 3-13. 

Brancato, S. 2009. “Transcultural Outlooks in The Buddha of Suburbia and 

Some Kind of Black”. In Barthet, S. B. (ed.). 2009. A Sea for Encounters: Essays 

Towards A Postcolonial Commonwealth. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, pp. 

51-66. 

Ferguson, N. 2004. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. 

London/New York: Penguin Books. 

Hansel, R. 2000. Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain. Oxford: 

Oxford University Press. 

Head, D., 2003. “Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the 

Millenium”. In Lane, R. J. (ed.). 2003. Contemporary British Fiction. 

Cambridge: Polity, pp. 106-119. 

59

Hussain, Y. 2005. Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and 

Ethnicity. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate. 

Ilcan, S. 2002. Longing in Belonging: The Cultural Politics of Settlement. 

Westport: Praeger Publishers. 

Kubisz, M. 2007. “London’s ´Little Worlds´: Narratives of Place in 

Contemporary Black British Writing”. In Kušnír, J. (ed.). 2007. Literatures in 

English in the Context of Post-Colonialism, Postmodernism and the Present. 

Prešov: Prešovská univerzita, pp. 124-136. 

Kureishi, H. 1986. “The Rainbow Sign”. In The Word and The Bomb. 2005. 

London: Faber and Faber, pp. 13-36. 

Kureishi, H. 1990. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. 

Moss, L., 2003. “The Politics of Everyday Hybridity. Zadie Smith’s White 

Teeth”. In Wasafiri, vol. 39, issue 6, pp. 11-17. 

Newland, P. 2008. The Cultural Construction of London’s East End. 

Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. 

Phillips, C. 2001. A New World Order. London: Secker & Warburg. 

Said, E.W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. 

Sandhu, S. 2003. Come hungry, leave edgy. In London Review of Books 

[online], vol. 25, no. 19, pp. 10-13 [cited 31 July 2010]. Available from 

Internet: 

Smith, Z. 2000. White Teeth. London: Penguin Books. 

Smith, Z. “An Interview with Zadie Smith”. Masterpiece Theatre [online]. 

[cited 31 July 2010]. Available from Internet: 

 

Tew, P. 2007. The Contemporary British Novel. London/New York: 

Continuum. 

Yousaf, N. 2002. Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia: A Reader’s Guide. 

London/New York: Continuum. 

60

The Immigrant Experience and its Representation 

in Literature 


Introduction 

Multiculturalism, ethnic and national minorities, cultural groups. These 

are terms encountered by each of us on a daily basis. In the aftermath of 

technological development, the twin challenges of globalisation and a new 

world order, we are now citizens of a diverse and colourful Europe; we are 

members of multicultural societies and we are confronted by a variety of 

multicultural factors. Dividing lines between differences are less and less 

distinct, but, paradoxically, we are trying to raise awareness of them in an 

attempt to preserve our own ‘otherness’. These notions are inevitably 

reflected in various fields of study, not only in socio-cultural studies, but 

also in history, politics, philosophy, economics and, moreover, in literature 

and literary criticism. Cultural diversity is a phenomenon present in most 

countries. It gives rise to many important questions - “minorities and 

majorities representation, education curriculum, land claims, immigration 

and naturalization policy, even national symbols, such as the choice of 

national anthem or public holidays” (Kymlicka, 1996, p. 1). 

Modern societies are confronted with minority groups demanding the 

acceptance of their identity and accommodation of their cultural differences. 

This is often stated as one of the challenges of modern-day multiculturalism, 

which, according to Kymlicka, covers various forms of cultural pluralism, with 

its own problematic issues. In general, there are many ways in which the 

incorporation of any kind of minority into a political community can be 

understood: “from the conquest and colonization of previously self-governing 

societies, to the voluntary immigration of individuals and families” (ibid., 

1996, p. 10), while all ways modify the character of the group and its 

relationship with the dominant majority group. It is important to point out 

that in the case of non-voluntary immigration the individual, or group of 

individuals, tends to maintain its distinction from the majority nationality, 

while in the case of voluntary immigration full integration into the dominant 

society is usually desired. 

61

The aim of this article is to offer a more complex overview of the 

abovementioned topics, by presenting the main debates and conclusions 

emerging from globalisation and the close contact between various cultural 

groups, especially the immigrant experience in Great Britain. The second part 

of the article is focused on the portrayal of these ideas in literature. 

Even though various discussions and information are offered via the 

media, the topic is seldom explored from both relevant perspectives. All the 

abovementioned ideas are, in recent years, regularly portrayed in literature. 

In addition, more individual consequences of displacement and its new 

reality, such as the search and creation of one’s identity, the questioning of 

national memory and belonging are presented as well. The article is focused 

especially on problems and ambiguities within the immigrant experience, 

problems with labelling immigrant generations, the integration of those 

generations into the society of the host state, and their portrayal in 

literature. It is interesting to observe how these issues are viewed and 

presented by various authors (many of them having immigrant experience, or 

being of immigrant parentage themselves) and how they refer to the 

problems of immigrant generations in their writing. Many current bestselling 

literary works describing experience from various places in the world may be 

used to exemplify the thesis mentioned above. The much-acclaimed debut 

novel White Teeth (2000) written by Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips’s The Final 

Passage (1985), Hanif Kureshi’s My Son the Fanatic (1994), or Marina 

Lewycka’s immigrant novels A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), 

her second novel Two Caravans (2007), and her last novel We are All Made of 

Glue (2009) are global bestsellers, not only because of their writers’ unique 

writing styles, but also because of the accurate response to the situation 

present across the continent of Europe. Thus, it is pertinent to extrapolate 

the socio-cultural theory to be explored using these works as examples. 

Globalisation, Multiculturalism and Immigrant Experience 

Globalisation has long been an alluring vision. Philosophers and politicians 

have often welcomed the view of a universal and peaceful unity. Certainly, 

the world seems to be binding itself ever more tightly into seamless webs 

and networks. However, discussions on globalization rarely consider the 

notion of migration, which is increasingly becoming a relevant issue for every 

state and nation. After dealing with the problems of groups and minorities as 

62

such, in recent years, the question of the rights and the position of a social 

group marked as ‘immigrants’ has started to play an important role, not only 

in international cultural and political studies, but also in philosophy, history 

and literature. According to the International Organization for Migration, 

nowadays there are more than 300 million migrants around the world, of 

which the greater part are immigrants settled throughout Europe. Shortly 

after the revolutionary events in Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern Europe, 

the world public became aware of the serious ethnic and national issues 

concerning the migrants of these formerly communist countries. 

There is no other process more characteristic of our continent than 

migration. Its fundamental cause has always been a gap in the condition and 

living standards between one country, and another: a poor economic 

situation in the motherland, racial tensions, fear, on the one hand, and hope 

for change on the other. After the end of the Second World War, the 

countries characterised by emigration turned into migrant-receiving 

countries, a situation valid for more than fifty of the following years. With 

continuing issues connected to immigration (residential problems, rights of 

immigrants, education, employment, but also increasing fear and 

intolerance), the process of integration has increasingly come to the fore in 

various fields of study. It has also led to a different attitude to immigrants 

from various countries. While in the 1980s and 1990s, immigrants were 

forgivingly accepted, the subsequent decade has shown a rise in intolerance 

and various related problems. 

Due to migration, there is no country which could be described as 

homogenous in present-day Europe. After World War II, a huge flow of 

migrants from Central and Eastern Europe was recorded. These migrants 

were to leave their homes and property in their home country, and come to a 

new country searching for work opportunities in pursuit of creating new, 

more favourable living conditions. Always considered a labour force coming 

from ‘elsewhere’, the concept of identity and belonging was not questioned 

as much as in later years. Usually, they tended to live within communities 

clearly stating their origin and considering the host country as a source of 

opportunity, not as a new home. 

During the economic migration which followed World War II, nobody in 

the 1940s would have ever disputed that the best way for first wave 

immigrant integration was assimilation. Based on racial prejudices and beliefs 

that some races, or groups, could be more easily ‘assimilated’ than others, it 

63

was not unusual for job adverts to feature the addendum ‘no blacks need 

apply’ or ‘no coloureds’. Reoccurring problems became a part of everyday life 

and it became obvious that assimilation was not the way to solve such a 

complex issue as the integration of immigrants. 

The late 1960s brought a new form of migration - so called ‘family 

migration’. Members of families were migrating to another country in order 

to gain the same benefits of the host country as their relatives did. In these 

years, after the sympathy and tolerance to war immigrants passed away, and 

when the range of immigrants expanded to peoples from other parts of the 

world, immigrants were more-or-less expected to leave their distinctive 

heritage and assimilate entirely into existing cultural norms. This used to be 

known as the ‘Anglo-conformity’ model of immigration. Assimilation was 

understood as essential for political stability and was further rationalised 

through ethnocentric denigration of other cultures. Thus, for example, the 

groups which seemed to be inassimilable were denied entry (Kymlicka, 1996). 

In analysing the situation in Great Britain, the two biggest causes of the 

search for a new integration approach soon become apparent. While 

immigration policy was being continuously tightened, within normal society a 

new regime of racial, ethnic and cultural groups was created. Another cause 

was a diversion from the assimilation model and its intention to coordinate 

cultural relationships within various groups of society. The administration did 

not deal with the manner in which new immigrants should assimilate into 

British society, but, instead, attempted to balance the differences and to 

guarantee social cohesion. When, in 1965, the incoming Labour government 

introduced an integration approach, based on good race and cultural 

relations, the crucial factors were no longer the obligations and needs of the 

individual, but the satisfactory provision of rights to different ethnic, racial 

and cultural communities, based on equality. Finally, at the end of the 1960s 

and the beginning of 1970s, under pressure from immigrant groups and 

international criticism, most of the migrant-receiving countries rejected the 

assimilatory model, and adopted a much more tolerant policy where, for a 

while, it eventually became fully accepted to let immigrants keep their 

customs, traditions, religious convictions and free demonstration of 

belonging to their motherland. 

However, increased integration attempts were suspended when, in the 

1970s, the Conservatives came to power. Subsequent policy focused on an 

immigration regime that had many strict measures and controls. The 1971 

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Immigration Act, and the even more restrictive 1982 Nationality Act, were 

enacted in order to control, and eventually prevent, secondary migration. 

The adopted measures were designed to solve problems with increasing 

unemployment and global recession. Increasing disorder in the 1980s caused 

by residual problems within the coexistence of the majority and culturally 

different minority groups, and the deepening social crisis within these 

communities brought increasing intolerance to the issue of incoming 

immigrants (Hellová, 2008). 

Paradoxically, it was socio-economic difficulties which brought back the 

idea of multiculturalism into politics. Local authorities renewed their 

attempts to adopt a series of measures ensuring tolerance and equality, such 

as an equal approach in terms of social housing, representation of ethnic 

groups in local administration and factoring cultural differences into the 

provision of services. Even though in Great Britain Thatcher’s government 

described multiculturalism and the multicultural model of integration as a 

primary danger harming the identity of Great Britain, and that the only way 

to prevent the country’s identity becoming redundant, or, at very least its 

modification, was to restrict immigration and preserve integration in the 

form of assimilation. The result was not a final repudiation of 

multiculturalism - due to the increasing amount of votes among minorities. 

When, in 1997, the Labour Party of Tony Blair came to power, it managed to 

revive a policy of multiculturalism. It introduced a new strategy in solving the 

question of immigrant integration based on the celebration of 

multiculturalism, following the concept of Britain as a ‘community of 

communities’ (where the citizens are not understood only as individuals, but 

also as members of a certain ethnic, religious, cultural or regional 

community) and offering a new definition of British identity (Hellová, 2008). 

This is probably one of the reasons why, in the late 1990s and beyond, a 

migratory process described as ‘reunification migration’ saw an increase. By 

the end of the twentieth century, the population of Western Europe changed 

to include people from Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean area, Africa, Asia 

and India who were no longer temporary workers, but permanent residents. 

Globalisation nowadays offers various opportunities to manual workers, as 

well as to highly qualified specialists. Especially in Great Britain, immigrants 

have a wide spectrum of privileges and rights: they can use the benefits of 

social security, education in their own language is ensured, and they are 

encouraged to promote their cultural differences in the public sphere. 

65

Therefore, they are not expected to become “exemplary Englishmen, Scots or 

Welsh anymore” (Modood, 1997, p. 79). However, they are still obliged to 

respect British law and the legislative system and be loyal to British 

citizenship. As Modood later states, “divergence is accepted, but it cannot 

make a negative effect on British life-values construction” (ibid., 1997, p. 78). 

People from all cultures and ethnicities can be found in every corner of 

Britain and each person, in his or her own way, has contributed to make 

Britain the place it is. Nowadays, minority groups in Great Britain make up 

almost eight percent of the country’s population - over 4.6 million people. 

But it is important to differentiate between the concept of cultural diversity 

and that of national minorities. According to Kymlicka, “immigrant groups are 

not ‘nations’, and thus do not occupy the homeland. Their distinctiveness is 

manifested primarily in their family lives and in voluntary associations, and is 

not inconsistent with their institutional integration. They still participate 

within the public institutions of the dominant culture(s) and speak the 

dominant language” (Kymlicka, 1996, p. 14). This notion makes us understand 

that finding a correct answer to the question of immigrant integration is a 

complex process realised on more than one level. 

After the final rejection of Anglo-conformity, immigrants were no longer 

expected to subject themselves entirely to the norms and traditions of the 

dominant culture, and indeed were encouraged to maintain some aspects of 

their separateness. This caused a paradigm shift in how immigrants 

integrated into their host country’s society. As Kymlicka points out, “affirming 

the rights to maintain immigrants’ ethnic heritage to some extent also 

involved reforming the public institutions of the dominant culture, so as to 

provide some recognition or accommodation of their heritage” (ibid., 1996, 

p. 78). 

Obviously, the binding of various cultural units raises many questions that 

need to be answered. Every European state and nation has its positive and 

negative historical experience regarding the coexistence of various minorities 

on its territory. However, the experience up to now, in the search of 

coexistence between minority and majority communities, shows that there is 

no general model which can be applied in cases where tension occurs. The 

situation of each national minority is different; each has different cultural, 

social and political ambitions and a different relationship with the majority 

community. 

66

The multicultural model of integration of immigrants adopted primarily in 

Great Britain, but also in Canada, Australia and Sweden, can be understood 

as a long-term process of integration of miscellaneous groups based on 

various ethnic and cultural allegiances to a particular community. Apart from 

the abovementioned privileges of the communities, integration is based on 

equal rights, but also upon obligations of the minority groups as well as the 

majority society. So far, it is still the most relevant theoretical model of 

integration emerging from the aforementioned assimilation model, within 

which nation is defined as a political entity with a constitution, law and 

citizenship, and immigrants are considered as assimilated only if they respect 

the legal system and national culture of society based on common principles. 

The multicultural model also requires a political society based on 

constitution, law and membership, but immigrants do have all the rights and 

privileges ensuring their cultural differentiation. However, they still need to 

adopt legal and political acceptance of the host country, in full respect of its 

cultural values. Thus, the process of integration still has a strong tendency to 

naturalisation. 

In recent years, the question of the further development of the 

multicultural model has been raised. The experiences of the first adult 

immigrant generation are important for the future of later established groups 

or ethnicities, but even more decisive is the subsequent fate of their children. 

Some of the new prognoses suggest a procedural state which stays culturally 

neutral and leaves the individual and a group to influence each other freely, 

with only minimal procedural intervention. Despite the fact that such a 

constitution would be a highly decentralised unit, under the impact of 

continuing migration and globalization, the ability to organise different 

identities in one country is, from a future perspective, undoubtedly 

unrealistic. 

It is important to consider that immigration, together with the 

incorporation of national minorities, are the two most common sources of 

cultural diversity in the modern state. However, it needs to be mentioned 

that there are some groups that would not exactly fit into either the national 

minority or voluntary immigrant group. Those are, for example, refugees, 

who, like immigrants, came to the country as individuals or families, but their 

arrival cannot be marked as ‘voluntary’. There are also immigrants who 

actually came through choice, but only because they had been previously 

67

promised to be allowed to re-create their own separate self-governing 

community (Kymlicka, 2007). 

In dealing with the topic, it is important to define the concepts as well. 

From the sociological point of view, migrants should be clearly differentiated 

from ethnic minorities. Firstly, Kymlicka splits these according to the 

character of their desired rights (for ethnic minorities it is apparently a 

question of cultural rights, while, for immigrants, more important are the 

rights opening the possibility of their integration into the majority society) 

and then according to the existence (ethnic minorities) or non-existence 

(migrants) of their own culture (Kymlicka, 1996). It is important to state that 

at present, when we are already encountering the second generation of 

immigrants, the formerly bipolar division of ethnologist and culturologist 

cannot be stated that firmly, since both of the mentioned terms have been 

coming closer in meaning, and merging. 

Another theme needed to be delineated and observed is the generationlabelling 

of immigrants, since labelling and distinguishing between first and 

second generation of immigrants is primarily an unsolved problem, not only 

in the field of literature and literary criticism, but also in the political and 

cultural sciences, and sociology. The very basic definitions and differentiation 

between the first and second generation of immigrants found in various 

cultural and sociological studies show some ambiguities. A group of 

immigrants labelled as ‘first generation’ is often understood as a group of 

immigrants which has moved to a new country and has been assimilated. The 

label ‘second generation immigrants’ is then understood as the generation of 

descendants of the immigrant parents. In an attempt to clearly distinguish 

the immigrant generations and immigrant waves, other explanations regard 

the label of first immigrant generation as the first generation born and raised 

in the host country. Therefore, the second immigrant generation is 

represented by the descendants of the first one. These men and women, 

born and raised in the host country – which in this case is actually their 

motherland – consider their futures mostly in an urban context. 

Another term which has arisen recently is the notion of the ‘1.5 immigrant 

generation’, represented by immigrants who were born in the motherland, 

spent the early years of their lives there and were then brought to a host 

country. Their situation is specific, since they carry the basic social and 

cultural values from the motherland but then mix them with the values of a 

host country, which, after being raised and educated in that country, 

68

ecomes their new homeland. Some ethnologists have also used the term 

‘third generation migrants’, though it is highly questionable whether this is 

meaningful, since a third generation is culturally distinct and, in some cases, 

it is probably more accurate to speak of an established ethnic minority. 

Reassessing the definition of generation labelling, this article utilises the 

first definition, describing the first immigrant generation as peoples coming 

to a new country and settling there, and the second generation as their 

descendants. This approach is much more established in numerous sociocultural 

debates and essays, as well as in literary works, especially when 

dealing with the numerous problems of second immigrant generation - those 

who did not directly influence the process of displacement and are searching 

for their identity in order to establish the idea of a home country, vacillating 

between the country of origin of their parents and their host land. The term 

‘1.5 immigrant generation’ is later used, especially in order to distinguish 

between those who were already born in the new country from those who 

were raised in the new country, but who remember the motherland from 

their own experience. 

When discussing the second generation of immigrants in particular, from 

the many-layered problems of this group (the problem of identification with 

the state and country, the theme of country as one’s home, the question of 

two motherlands, choice of nationality, portrayals and stereotypes of the 

other, relationships with the majority group, notion of history, relationship to 

languages and their symbolic aspects, attitudes towards customs and family 

traditions, degree of organisation in institutions) the main question that 

arises is that of convergence with the values of the host country and 

divergence from the values of the first generation (Benža, 1998). 

Thus, the socio-cultural and political approach to this generation, as well 

as its portrayal in literature, is viewed as a specific process. The process of 

adaptation for recent second generations is a matter of coping with many 

challenges on many levels emerging from growing up in an environment 

formerly foreign to their parents. The principal outcomes of this process are 

determined by education and school performance, language, knowledge and 

use, ethnic or cultural identities, the level of parent-child generational 

conflict and the extent to which peer relations reach beyond the ethnocultural 

circle. As Hevešiová claims in her article Exile and Displacement, 

“second generation immigrants often tend to loosen the ties to the parent’s 

motherland more easily. The process of assimilation seems to be less 

69

complicated, if not even desired. The differences that separate them from 

the rest of the society become the driving force in the process of their 

identity construction” (Hevešiová, 2008a, p. 89). 

To be a second generation immigrant is a big challenge indeed. Although 

one feels oneself to be a member of the current society, internal or external 

differences are always going to be present in one’s identity. Despite being 

born in the host country, most members of this generation were raised in a 

bilingual and bicultural environment, so the presence of a dual-identity is 

indisputable. Discussion of the dilemmas that members of this generation 

have to face and the many psychological and sociological challenges they 

have to overcome do not often take place within socio-cultural theory, 

although they can be observed at all levels in almost all countries. 

When preserving bilingualism in the second immigrant generation, an 

interesting comment can be made. As Simona Hevešiová points out in her 

article Language as a Medium of Resistance language is one of the main tools 

not only to provide cultural exchange but also to reflect one’s attitude to one 

or the other culture. Thus, not only self-representation, but also the power, 

superiority and dominance of a certain culture can be expressed (Hevešiová, 

2008b). If it is believed that the language used by the individual forms his 

view of reality, the preference of one or another language in the case of the 

second immigrant generation can strongly influence the ties either to host 

country, or motherland society. Therefore, many of members of this group 

intentionally either limit or intensify the usage of one or another language. 

But what happens if the usage of either language is restricted externally? 

Just to present an overview in connection to bilingualism and secondgeneration 

immigrants, in the early 1920s opposition to bilingualism derived 

strength from the dominant scientific wisdom – various studies in education 

and psychology argued that bilingualism brought “failure, mental confusion, 

and damaged the well-being of immigrant children” (Portes, 1996, p. 10). It 

was believed that genetic differences between races limited the ability to 

learn both languages properly, or that the environment of the immigrant 

children, in particular the use of foreign language at home, had “a negative 

impact on their consciousness and creates a linguistic confusion” (ibid., 1996, 

p. 11). This idea was unimaginably preserved almost until 1962 when new 

research showed that bilinguals had actually achieved higher scores in a 

variety of intelligence tests. 

70

The typical pattern for the first immigrant generation was to learn English 

in order to be able to handle all the issues of everyday life. The mother 

tongue was often spoken at home and passed on to the children. The 

children of immigrants then continued to speak the language of their parents 

at home, but in school, work and public life they used mostly English. Then 

the following third generation changed the home language to English, which 

thus became the mother tongue of following generations. This process is 

accelerated by the fact that most education is provided only in English. As 

Kymlicka later points out in his study Multicultural Citizenship, “given the 

spread of standardised education, the high demands for literacy in work, and 

widespread interaction with government agencies, any language which is not 

a public language becomes so marginalised that it is likely to survive only 

among the small group, or in ritualised form, not as a living and developing 

language underlying a flourishing culture” (Kymlicka, 1996, p. 78). However 

natural this effect is, the rapid transition towards monolingualism most 

certainly represents an enormous loss. Understanding language as one of the 

basic means of representation in the subject of identity, there is no doubt 

that ethnic, linguistic and cultural characteristics will eventually virtually 

disappear within the third immigrant generation. Learning the old language 

could be an interesting hobby or business skill, but for this immigrant 

generation, it is an Anglophone culture which defines their territory, identity 

and choices. 

This could have a strong influence on both individuals and common 

cultural group identity. It is indisputable that members of a society share not 

only the same language, but also share similar basic ideas, concepts, and 

beliefs. Moreover, these commonly shared ideas are crucial for developing 

the cultural identity of the group. If there is another concept creating 

personal, local or national identity, it is one’s memory. As well as with 

recently experienced events, memory also deals with the deeper past. It is 

represented within the media, the arts, and social science. But most of the 

artefacts brought by the individual are gained from domestic customs and 

memories, as well as from family narratives. These together create a 

common experience, common values and common memory. 

During the changing of world (b)orders, very often the manipulation of 

cultural memory occurred. There were especially cases of civil disturbance, 

whose suppression would be assiduously media-managed, which could cause 

long-lasting hatred against the dominant culture (for instance concealing the 

71

acial motivation of numerous attacks during the Notting Hill riots in late 

1950s, or Southall riots in late 1970s). The witnesses of the abovementioned 

experiences are passing away and a modified kind of cultural memory is 

emerging. 

Both individual and cultural memories are an integral part of human lives. 

The present socio-cultural conditions of an individual are definitely 

conditioned by the origin and experience of the group. The knowledge and 

awareness of the past thus shapes the identity of the individual. The question 

stands: how to become familiar with the distinctive past? As Smiešková 

points out in her article “Memory and Time: The Historiographic 

Represenation”, it is nowadays almost “impossible to transmit the real 

objective truth, because it will always be contaminated by the process of 

subjectivisation. Objective history is only one narrative and its quality refers 

to the general characteristics of any other text” (Smiešková, 2008, p. 19). 

Therefore, while the bare historical data can be easily found in various 

resources, the outlook of the individual with personal experience can also be 

found in memorial or recollective narratives included in various artistic 

works, which can serve as equally important to reconstruct what is 

understood as a personal or narrative history. 

Stories of Past and Present: The Representation of the Immigrant 

Experience in Literature 

Altered socio-cultural circumstances, and their consequences, ordinarily 

result in new types of literature, new ways of writing and representation and 

in increased reader interest. The literary works to be analysed here, written 

by various authors, have gained huge attention and popularity due to new 

supranational forces crossing the boundaries between different racial, ethnic, 

and religious groups, or just among people in general. 

Since the 1980s, growing interest in a field of literature designated as 

‘migrant literature’ has been increasingly observed and discussed. This 

interest can easily be explained by the presence of new problems and 

emerging issues in daily life. Migrant literature is a group of writings which 

initially concerned people who left their homes for either political, economic 

or religious reasons to settle in countries, or cultural communities, which are 

often very alien to them. Today, we can also talk about migrants leaving for 

new reasons, such as better opportunities for career progression and study, 

family reunification, or for a myriad of personal reasons. 

72

In cultural and ethnological studies, two migrant perspectives are often 

strictly distinguished: the emigrant perspective - of those whose main focus is 

backwards to the country of origin; and the immigrant perspective – that of 

the migrant who is reconciled with the prospect of permanent residence in 

the country of arrival. Although these terms are often used within literary 

criticism, it is important to reassert that emigrant and immigrant perspectives 

in a socio-cultural context refer to two separate outlooks (although the 

emigrant perspective can often transform into an immigrant one) while in 

literary portrayal, the line between perspective focused on the country of 

origin, and the perspective towards the host country cannot be firmly drawn. 

Here, we see the definition of ‘in between’ identity being understood as the 

continuous questioning of the bonds to the host or mother country. Migrant 

literature, in perspective to the immigrant experience, often focuses on the 

social conditions in the migrants' country of origin; the experience of 

migration itself; and on the experience and reception which can be endured 

in the new host country – very often involving various problematic issues and 

negative experiences, such as racism and hostility, and a sense of 

rootlessness. These notions are exemplified in numerous literary works such 

as Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, Hanif 

Kureshi’s My Son the Fanatic, or Marina Lewycka’s ‘immigrants’ novels. 

Before looking at contemporary literary works, it is interesting to point 

out one of the first novels dealing with the aforementioned issues. Samuel 

Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, first published in 1956, is often considered to be 

the very first novel on working (but poor) immigrant experience among Afro- 

Caribbeans in London, focusing on their everyday struggles, such as poverty, 

prejudice and injustice, in the wake of a new British nationality law in 1948. 

Even though the plot is not really distinctive, the narrative describing the life 

of the main character, Trinidian Moses Aloetta, captures the essence of the 

immigrant experience, and is relevant even today. Although Moses has lived 

in London for ten long years, he still feels he has not gained, or achieved, 

anything. His mind is still tied to home, which arouses not only homesickness, 

but also feelings of self-hatred, disappointment, and segregation. While in 

the initial parts of the story the main characters are humbled into quiet 

acquiescence by their migrant experience, later on, their register alters, and 

from standardised language they change to a creolised form of English. As 

the story progresses, the third-person narrator adopts this form of language 

as well. This was a very new dimension added to the traditional novel, 

73

epresenting the changing situation within the country. Here, the mention of 

Hevešiová’s thesis concerning a language as a means of communication, and 

tool to generate power, truth and order, and self-representation, can be 

recalled (Hevešiová, 2008b). Accepting this thesis, it is very common within 

migrant literary writing to use modified, or multiple, languages, establishing 

“not only the intercultural dialogue, but also the multicultural experience to 

the reader” (Smiešková et al., 2008, p. 6). However, this is believed to be one 

of the first novels within the analysed literary canon to present a step 

forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonization. Having 

represented a group hitherto rendered invisible, it actually raised the 

awareness of immigrants’ real presence within society. 

Almost thirty years later, in 1985, another book portraying the immigrant 

experience among Afro-Caribbeans in London was published. Displacement, 

and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, is presented in Caryl Phillips’s first novel 

The Final Passage. The story takes place in a similar setting, late 1950s 

London, when a young family from the West Indies decides to join the exodus 

from the homeland, in order to search for happiness and prosperity in a new 

country. The first part of the book is set in the small Caribbean island St. Kitts. 

Leila, the main character of the story, always feeling different because of the 

‘lighter’ colour of her skin, was, from childhood, indoctrinated with mistrust 

and vigilance against the ’whites’. Although her mother never told her, Leila 

always believed herself to be a child of an affair with a white man. Later, it 

turns out that her mother was sexually abused as a child by her white greatuncle. 

As time goes by, Leila creates her own family context with the 

youthful, irresponsible Michael, and later, her son Calvin. Having settled 

down, she one day discovers that her unwell mother has left for England in 

order to search for specialist medical help. Increasingly, Leila longs for 

reunification with her mother, so she finally decides to leave, together with 

her family, to London in an emigrant ship and start a new life there. However, 

the new start is not that promising and brings many difficulties. Being part of 

a ‘visible minority’, struggling for a living, trying to find a job, facing all the 

prejudices emerging from racism are daily realities. Finding her mother in a 

hospital, and thus achieving her desired family reunification, Leila’s ‘final 

passage’ should be complete. But after her mother dies, she finds out about 

her husband’s betrayal, is told that she is pregnant again, and starts a new 

journey - this time towards her own happiness, which leads her back to St. 

Kitts. 

74

It is perhaps useful to remind ourselves that the motif of passage, journey 

or travel in analysed writing has more significant meanings and thus can 

represent a journey not only in a physical way, but also in a spiritual, 

metaphorical and existential one. Ostensibly a journey as a pursuit of a new 

life and happiness, Leila’s passage reminds us of the continual process of 

Afro-Caribbean people searching for a land in order to create a place they 

may call home. The movement of people from the West Indies to England 

can then also be understood as a further attempt to reconnect to a splintered 

past and to create eventually an ethno-specific space representing a new 

home. 

Neither Selvon’s Moses, nor Phillip’s Leila fulfil the purpose of their 

journeys - finding happiness in a new country. Instead of expected fortune 

and positive challenges they meet only difficulties, hostility and contempt. 

Having no property, or background in the host country, they are just other 

newcomers among many. This dislocation raises multi-layered questions; on 

one level, material ones - how to find proper work opportunities, how to 

assert oneself, how to ensure proper conditions for the family, but on 

another level, the questioning of one’s otherness, self-esteem and individual 

autonomy. In Selvon’s Lonely Londoners the voice of uniqueness is 

represented in the characters’ language, whereas the form of narrative in 

Phillips’s Final Passage states, and answers, the aforementioned questions 

explicitly. While the ‘Lonely Londoners’ idly suffer the conditions and 

ambiguities emanating from their life in London, Leila later takes destiny into 

her own hands and decides to start a new journey – not following her 

mother, not staying with the husband, but striking out on a new path leading 

to her home. This also reflects the change of portrayal of the first immigrant 

generation in literature. The ‘Lonely Londoners’ stay in London in the midst 

of stories of poverty, prostitution and alcoholism, whereas Leila, although 

only nineteen years-old, doesn’t wait for never-to-arrive redemption, but 

continuously tries to form her life on her own terms. However, it is not 

claimed that Leila’s success lies in her aiming back at the motherland. Her 

achievement lies in the fact that she answered the questions of identity and 

belonging according to her own beliefs and values, and that she was able to 

make this choice on her own. 

Whilst the main concern of the previous two literary works is the problem 

of adaptation by first generation immigrants, most contemporary works 

focus on the issues connected to the second generation. Questioning one’s 

75

sense of belonging, the portrayal of the multicultural environment, 

generational conflicts, gender questions, or self-realisation attempts are 

recursively presented in numerous literary works. There is no doubt that 

within these works the overarching topic is searching for one’s identity. 

Whether by language, behaviour, or various attempts to either reject or 

adopt the values of one of their countries, the characters in the chosen 

novels question their way of life, their place in it, and their sense of belonging 

to one or another nation. 

In Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic, old Parvez, who migrated from 

Pakistan to Britain, is trying to ensure (Western) quality of life and education 

for his son, Ali. Even though, in the beginning, Parvez respected the ideas and 

values brought from Pakistan, he increasingly admires and agrees with the 

western way of life. He enjoys the typical English breakfast, English ale, and 

English people. He makes friends with a prostitute, Bettina, whom he once 

found in his taxi and tries to help her in every way possible. Later on, he 

notices changes in his son’s behaviour and is afraid that Ali might have fallen 

into problems with drugs, or a local gang. Eventually, young Ali, although not 

brought up in a religious way, prays all day and simply refuses to speak to his 

father, because of his way of life and his being corrupted by the West, 

breaking the rules set in the Koran by drinking alcohol, eating pork and 

consorting with a prostitute. In Ali’s opinion, his father is "too implicated in 

Western civilization" (Kureishi, 1997, p. 157) and he feels ashamed of him in 

front of others from the local Muslim community. The narrative reaches its 

climax when Parvez, drunk and desperate, tries to speak to his son after Ali 

offends Bettina, and in a furious rage starts to beat his son. Ali’s question, of 

who is actually the fanatic, leads the reader to further question the search for 

the character’s identity. Since the main conflict of the novel is presented 

between two different overviews of Ali’s identity, and expectations of him, 

the most obvious clash in the story is that of identity. While Parvez sees his 

son as the fulfilment of his ‘British dream’, Ali is devoted to the roots of the 

motherland, and sees England as a place full of sin, immorality and 

corruption. 

Hanif Kureishi, offering a narrative which inverts the conventional 

paradigm, where the first generation follows the values of the old country, 

and the subsequent generation is trying to assimilate with the values of the 

new one, emphasises the questioning of identity and belonging, and clarifies 

that it is not simply a process in which the older generation cannot untie the 

76

onds with the motherland and the new generation is constantly trying to 

loosen them, but that the questioning of identity is a constructive, dynamic 

process linked both with the place of origin as well as with the new home, 

which is unique and individual within each character. 

These generational conflicts are present in most of the literary works 

concerning both first and second generation immigrants in one place. As in 

Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic, and other literary works, the conflict between 

generations emerges from the attempt to preserve the cultural codes of 

motherland on one side – usually by the representative of one generation – 

and the will to ‘assimilate’ within the host country, on the other. For 

example, Zadie Smith, in her novel White Teeth, serves us a story about the 

lives of two wartime friends, Englishman Archie Jones, and Bangladeshi 

Samad Iqbal, who emigrated to England after World War II and settled in 

London. Problems and conflicts arising from the attempt to assimilate, 

disappointment in the conditions and values of the host country, and fear of 

losing his own cultural substance lead Samad to send one of his sons to 

Bangladesh, hoping that he will receive a proper upbringing under the 

teachings of Islam. Ironically, after coming back from Bangladesh he becomes 

an atheist and devotes his life to science, while his brother, despite his earlier 

(for Samad, typically Western) drinking and wildly irresponsible life, becomes 

an angry fundamentalist, and a member of an Islamist organisation. The 

novel depicts the lives of a wide range of immigrant backgrounds, including 

Afro-Caribbean, Muslim, and Jewish, while they are confronted with conflicts 

between assimilating and preserving their cultures. While all of them are 

trying to create new lives for themselves, they are also still trying to hold on 

to their pasts. As Hevešiová has it: “The question of one’s real homeland 

associated with a sense of belonging cannot be answered straightforwardly, 

since living in the ‘in between’ space often results in the formation of a 

double consciousness, or a feeling of hybridity” (Hevešiová, 2008a, p. 86). 

The abovementioned feature of this type of literature is firmly connected 

with the attempt (through commonality between individuals) to find a proper 

solution to the problem of societal cohesion. This effort is present in the 

writing in various ways. For example, in Smith’s White Teeth, the repeated 

motif of ‘white teeth’ presents the fact that while all the families introduced 

in the novel have numerous things that set them apart, white teeth are a 

unifying and all-embracing quality binding the diverse parts of different 

cultures in a new host culture. In other works, such a binding force can be 

77

presented as the following of the tradition of nation, or the individual within 

his family in the motherland, leading a community-based life, or trying to find 

clues within the country of origin. In contemporary writing, this can also be 

presented by means of hybrid language, based on the language of the host 

country, but flavoured with lexis and phrasing from the old one. 

When discussing the use of language as a means of referring to and 

representing reality, it is important to understand the role of speech and its 

influence on individuals’ vision of reality. While settling, living in and – in the 

case of the second generation - receiving an education in a host country, the 

‘standard’ language is often adopted. On the other hand, language still 

represents a powerful means how to preserve one’s connection to the 

motherland. In literature, a version of language in hybridised form, using 

untranslated expressions in the language of the immigrant‘s motherland is 

chosen in order to demonstrate otherness, the presence of foreign roots, and 

the relation of the character to the motherland and their host country. 

Therefore, it is also understood that representatives of the first generation of 

immigrants use a language with many more expressions in their original 

language, while those representing the second generation use more ‘purified’ 

language. Another specific feature is the language used by the narrator of the 

story. Although the undertones of a character’s approach can be observed 

through that character’s register and utterances, the role of the narrator of 

the story is again becoming substantial, since he/she is the one providing 

connection between various attitudes of characters. “Thus the distinction 

between ‘I’ and ‘We’, where ‘You’ is at once separate – interpellating the 

reader as other, as witness – and inclusive – as in ‘if one is born in Britain” 

(Frontier, 2003, p. 6). 

All these features can be clearly exemplified in Marina Lewycka’s Short 

History of Tractors in Ukrainian, chosen as a comprehensive model of this 

type of writing, for it serves as a good example not only because of the 

handling of the topic, but also because it is written from personal experience, 

one of a writer of Ukrainian parentage herself. At the end of World War II her 

parents, who had spent the war years in forced labour camps, were finally 

reunited in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, where she was later born, 

raised and educated. Lewycka tends to be more than familiar with the 

nuances of immigrant integration and the differences between the immigrant 

generations. As she stated in an interview for The Guardian newspaper, 

78

fiction is the way through which she explains the world to herself (Moss, 

2007). 

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was a debut novel written by 

Lewycka when she was fifty-eight years-old. However, over a million copies 

have been sold and the novel has been translated into 32 languages; it is 

widely regarded as a hilariously funny book dealing with a genuinely relevant 

issue. Set in Peterborough, in the early 1990s, it is a specific example of the 

aforementioned ideas. The obscure title refers to a book within the book, 

written by Nikolai, the narrator's father, detailing the contribution of the 

humble tractor to modern Ukraine's violent history. Even though the title is 

unclear at the beginning, by reading the novel, the reader eventually 

understands it in its tragic-comic essence. 

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is the story of an elderly Ukrainian 

widower, a naturalised British citizen, who finds love in the form of an 

economic migrant. Two years after his wife, Ludmilla, dies Nikolai calls his 

daughter Nadezhda with the news that he is planning to remarry - to thirtysix 

year old Valentina, a Ukrainian immigrant. The fact that Valentina is still 

married, and only wishes to marry eighty-four year-old Nikolai to stay in 

England, does not matter; he is caught up in saving this woman from the old 

country. Worried that he is being taken advantage of by the attractive gold 

digger, Nadia calls her sister, Vera, putting aside years of bitter rivalry, in 

order to rescue their father from his Big Ideas and the calculating Valentina. 

Even though this novel is regarded predominantly as a funny and 

entertaining story, particularly down to the unique wit and sense of humour 

of the author, it is important to consider it also as a serious novel about 

family relationships and conflicts, about relations between immigrants and 

their children, about the effects of a post-war mentality on one’s view of the 

world, about abuse on both a personal and political scale, and about 

conflicting ideologies and political states. Lewycka provides us with a 

complex overview of the everyday life and problems of Ukrainian immigrants 

living in Britain, not simply enumerating specific difficulties, but recounting 

daily events and tensions, not only between immigrants and their situation in 

the host country, but also between the generations of immigrants 

themselves. For instance, Nadia, the narrator of the story, represents the 

child born in freedom, able to live her life and be idealistic, to work to save 

the world and make it a better place. Vera believes that Nadia can afford the 

luxury of irresponsibility, because she’s never seen the dark underside of life; 

79

contrarily, Nadia believes that Vera is out to feather her own nest, and 

doesn’t understand the true value of hard work. These fundamental 

differences between sisters represent the central conflict vividly presented 

within the story. Gradually, Nadia understands why she and her sister — born 

ten years apart — have grown up with such different views of their shared 

Eastern European past. Eventually, she comes to understand her parents. 

Getting back to the previously mentioned issue of labelling immigrant 

generations, we can clearly see the features manifested on the part of 

characters presented in the story. Thus, Nikolai, having lived in Peterborough 

for many years, still lives in the old ‘Ukrainian’ way. Meeting only people 

from the community, remembering events from the motherland, hoarding 

cans of food at home, he serves as an archetype of a first generation 

immigrant. The older daughter Vera, born and raised in Ukraine, happy to live 

in Britain, but still remembers and compares the values of motherland with 

the newer values in Britain, strictly conservative and raising her children the 

old-fashioned way, indoctrinating them with the values and history of Eastern 

Europe, represents the ‘1.5 immigrant generation’. The younger daughter, 

Nadia, the narrator of the story, raised in Britain, remembers the Ukraine 

only vaguely; being a liberal, she often argues over different ideas and values 

with her sister, and represents the second generation immigrant. It is 

important to state that this is only an initial differentiation between the 

generations. None of the characters stays unformed and during the story 

further development of their values and attitudes concerning the homeland 

and obtained identity and belonging can be observed. According to Stuart 

Hall, “cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’ and is 

not to be understood as a fixed essence” (Hall, 1990, p. 112). Thus, in the 

novel we can see the younger Nadia start to understand her father and sister, 

and finally accept some of the values with which she was subjected to by her 

Ukrainian mother as a child. 

The particular role of Valentina, the newcomer, coming to Britain to gain 

property and better social conditions for her and her son, shows us another 

perspective on how immigrants themselves differentiate between various 

groups within their community. Valentina, physically admired by the old 

Nikolai, who understands her situation and sees the parallels with his own, 

feeling sorry for her and wanting to help as well, finally turns out to be an 

empty calculating character. Presented as a wilfully ignorant woman 

determined to get what she wants, by using her appearance she serves as a 

80

source of many funny moments. Both daughters, despite the many 

differences between them, see her as an enemy, ignoring the fact that they 

actually share the same motherland. 

The tendency of “more assimilated” immigrants (the first two 

generations) to reject more recent incomers, even those of their own kind, 

occurs in the book repeatedly. When Valentina is about to arrive in 

Peterborough, Nikolai remembers the happy days in the old country, while 

his younger daughter obviously doesn’t share his notions: “Ukraina, he sighs, 

breathing in the remembered scent of mown hay and cherry blossom… But 

I can catch the distinct synthetic whiff of New Russia” (Lewycka, 2006, p. 1). 

Lewycka also makes many incisive comments concerning the long-lasting 

consequences of abuse, and those of certain political systems. For example, 

Vera, the older of the two sisters, even though partly representing a secondgeneration 

immigrant, also represents the asylum seeker and the immigrant, 

suffering from a post-war mentality, desperate for the luxuries of the West 

and believing in the superiority of capitalism to provide security. Valentina, 

portrayed as a money-grubbing wanton willing to do anything and take 

advantage of anyone to be able to stay in England, is actually following 

similar motivations. Maybe that’s why, in some ways, she can be seen as a 

sympathetic character. Nikolai forgives her anything, blaming it on the “postwar” 

mentality: “You see, he explains, it is her last hope, her only chance to 

escape persecution, destitution, and prostitution. Life in Ukraine is too hard 

for such a delicate spirit as hers” (Lewycka, 2006, p. 4). Valentina is indeed a 

victim of the privations she experienced; however, she carries her anger 

forward and turns it against others. 

Best of all is the author’s rendering of the hybrid half-English/half- 

Ukrainian language spoken by her characters, whose fractured syntax and 

colourful neologisms give the narrative its zest and uniqueness. This is 

obviously most relevant to Valentina and her narrative, and is implied at the 

very beginning of the story: “She wants to make a new life for herself and her 

son in the West, a good life, with good job, good money, nice car - absolutely 

no Lada no Skoda - good education for son - must be Oxford Cambridge, 

nothing less. She is an educated woman, by the way. Has a diploma in 

pharmacy. She will easily find well-paid work here, once she learns English” 

(Lewycka, 2006, p. 2). Later on, Valentina, speaking her pidgin Ukranian- 

English, invents many remarkable denominations, such as, “stop talk this bad 

news you peeping no-tits crow” (ibid., 2006, p. 98) or “you useless shrivel- 

81

ain shrivel penis donkey” (ibid., 2006, p. 138) or “you dog eaten-brain old 

bent stick” (ibid., 2006, p. 190), which are typically vigorous examples of her 

invective. 

However, having Ukrainian roots and background, the portrayal of 

immigrants in the novel resulted in offended readers and critics in Ukraine. 

Commenting on a statement of one of them in an interview for The Guardian, 

Lewycka claims: "It has taken me a while to understand why he hated it so 

much," says Lewycka, “but I think I do understand now. I've met a lot of 

Ukrainians since then. Before I wrote it, I didn't know many Ukrainian 

Ukrainians. I knew a lot of Ukrainians who lived over here, and they all 

thought it was a hoot. The Ukrainian Ukrainians are quite self-conscious 

about Ukraine as a country because it's newly emerged on to the world 

stage. They always ask you what people in the West think about Ukraine, and 

I think, 'Gosh, what can I say?' I can't tell them that actually people in the 

West don't think about Ukraine at all” (Moss, 2007). 

The novels dealing with this topic, such as Marina Lewycka’s A Short 

History of Tractors in Ukrainian, can give an interested reader a clearer 

overview on the subject of immigrants living in Britain. The author herself 

deals with the topic in all her literary works. For instance, in her follow-up 

novel, Two Caravans, Lewycka brings a story of the young Irina coming to 

England as an agricultural worker. Comparing a naïve, unspoilt Irina to her 

Western companions and other people she gets to know the writer points 

out the differences between the values of the two different worlds. Later on, 

still using her wit and black humour, the reader is offered an insight into the 

harder and darker sides of economic migration in connection to Western 

capitalism and the emerging problems of immigrants coming to the country, 

such as slum-like immigrant hostels on the coast, and the vicious exploitation 

of illegal workers and human trafficking. 

Her third novel We Are All Made of Glue is the story of an elderly Jewish 

immigrant, Naomi Shapiro and her struggles against authority in Great 

Britain. Later, through the memories of Mrs. Shapiro, the writer takes us on a 

nightmarish journey through the ghettos, camps and partisan enclaves of the 

1940s Europe. As in the case of the first bestselling novel, even when dealing 

with serious issues, Lewycka does not fall into moralising or judgmental 

undertones. Gently pointing out the difficult issues, she still uses that unique 

sense of humour, contrasting the characters and placing them in odd 

situations. 

82

All three of Lewycka’s immigrant novels introduce the reader to a variety 

of migration stories and the obscured causes hidden behind them. 

Reflections on the post-war socio-economic situation in Ukraine, the dark 

side of economic migration and its abuses all over the world, and descriptions 

of the ghettos and camps in 1940s Europe can all be found in various 

reference books and internet sources, but representation of these events and 

their outcomes through memorable, interesting and funny narrative can 

create a much more powerful effect upon the recipient. When discussing the 

immigrant experience in particular, its portrayal in literature offers the 

opportunity to present an individual’s story in a wider context, referring both 

to past and future, explaining both rational and personal motivations, while 

letting the reader decide which of them he, or she, would adopt placed in a 

similar set of circumstances. 

To conclude, the article introduced several significant literary works, 

which in different and remarkable ways portray various types of immigrant 

experience. Although the chosen novels are only some examples of a growing 

body of contemporary writing dealing with the problems, they clearly outline 

an interest in responding to real issues related to a global, culturally diverse 

society. Their themes, such as identity and a sense of belonging, selfawareness, 

gender-identity, equality, and their projection through language 

give us, in relation to the principal concepts of socio-cultural theory 

delineated in the first part of this article, a wider context of the continuous 

struggle between various cultural entities. As stated in one of the novels, 

“This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has 

been the century of the great immigrant experiment… Yet, despite all the 

mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other's lives 

with reasonable comfort, despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is 

no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English” 

(Smith, 2000, pp. 271-272). Thus, one can say, the abovementioned struggle 

is just a natural attempt to preserve individuality in today’s multicultural 

environment. 

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Culture and Children´s Literature 


Children, culture, literature 

Written mainly by adults and aimed mainly at children, the development 

of children´s and young adult literature has proven that literary works 

definitely reflect the social and cultural milieu of the time in which they were 

set down. Concepts of a child and childhood as social constructs – and thus 

also cultural constructs of the specific time and place - are reflected by 

children´s literature authors in their works consciously or subconsciously. 

However, the promotion of universal and supposedly timeless values is not 

always as straightforward and definite as one would think. Since its 

beginnings, children´s literature has changed a lot, and observing the 

alterations has become one of the most fascinating quests in literary history 

and tradition. 

Children´s literature (and the children´s world as such) often tells us much 

about the culture of adults at the time; paradoxically, sometimes even more 

than the adults would admit. A close reading of such literature and its 

reception by adults frequently disclose the trends in thinking and ideology of 

the era. Though predominantly fascinating, from time to time it also offers a 

rather scary image. Thus, issues like censorship in children´s and young adult 

literature, lists of recommended books and university syllabi may give us an 

interesting picture of what we consider worth reading for children, i.e. what 

values we have. Stories from, or set in, the past show our reading and 

interpretation backwards in time; here, history is rewritten, reshaped and 

relived in order to give meaning to the present. And, of course, equally 

important is the future as today´s children are future adults. 

It is thus natural that in order to pass down knowledge, the role of 

education cannot be suppressed. There have been several functions of 

children´s literature which have appeared over time and we can argue that 

morality and didacticism are the key elements of children´s and young adult 

fiction present since its very beginning, and are still very important regardless 

of the writers´ attempt to disguise them. As Enid Blyton – the author of The 

Famous Five series - confesses: “Naturally, the morals or ethics are intrinsic 

to the story – and therein lies their true power” (Dixon, 1977, p. 57). 

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The term culture is extremely wide, very general, frequently used in a very 

vague way and seems almost impossible to grasp. Tony Watkins refers to 

Raymond Williams, who summarises it as “one of the two or three most 

complicated words in the English language” (Williams, 1976, p. 76 quoted in 

Watkins, 2005, p. 7). Discussion of culture is everywhere, and it sometimes 

appears as if there exist innumerable different definitions of the term suiting 

various discourses, fields of study and concepts. And, of course, the term 

culture is extremely popular nowadays. One simply cannot deal with the 

humanities today without encountering or using the term. Thus, we 

sometimes work with the concept we do not know much about – obviously 

not a very desirable approach. 

The complexity of the term is expressed by Watkins: “Culture is an 

ambiguous term: a problem shared, perhaps, by all concepts which are 

concerned with totality, including history, ideology, society and myth” 

(Watkins, 2005, p. 57). A more detailed account and far broader definition of 

culture is explained by Mitchell as quoted in Watkins: “First, culture is the 

opposite of nature. It is what makes humans human. Second, ćulture´ is the 

actual, perhaps unexamined, patterns and differentiations of a people (as in 

Áboriginal culture´ or ´German culture´ - culture is a way of life). Third, it is 

the process by which these patterns developed… Fourth, the term indicates a 

set of markers that set one people off from another and which indicate to us 

our membership in a group… Fifth, culture is the way that all these patterns, 

processes, and markers are represented (that is, cultural activity, whether 

high, low, pop, or folk, that produces meaning). Finally, the idea of culture 

often indicates a hierarchical ordering of all these processes, activities, ways 

of life, and cultural production (as when people compare cultures or cultural 

activities against each other)” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 14, quoted in Watkins, 2005, 

p. 58, emphasis mine). 

One thus starts to hesitate if the discussions and agenda about culture – 

and in this case children´s literature - do not just lead to some blurred 

peripheral descriptions of customs, habits and strange names used in fiction 

for the young reader. To clarify things, we have to say that the aim of the 

present study is not to offer new cultural theories and apply them to literary 

works for children and young adults. We will just try to show some major 

trends and present their key concepts. Literature on cultural encounters will 

be divided into two subgroups. First, there are books actually depicting 

cultural encounters (e.g. a European child versus an African-American, a 

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Chinese child versus an American child). Secondly, there are books simply set 

in another culture, in which the cultural encounter occurs between a reader 

and a book, and the work does not necessarily present a cultural encounter 

in its content per se. Naturally, there are also cases in which these two 

subgroups merge. 

Historical perspective – British literature 

To discuss the present, a short glimpse to the past can explain a few 

modern children´s literature phenomena. Dealing with the literature written 

until the middle of the twentieth century, the emphasis must be put on the 

different standpoints and approaches to the issue. The first one is the 

overwhelming policy of ´the white western superiority´ reflected in children´s 

literature and resulting in the creation of a number of deeply rooted cultural 

stereotypes. 

A basic overview of cultural stereotyping in British literature is discussed 

by Bob Dixon in Catching Them Young 2: Political Ideas in Children´s Fiction 

(1977). Dixon analyses several books pointing at the ways in which the 

cultural supremacy of whites is implied in works for young readers, and doing 

this he shows how the political goals of empire-building found their way into 

literature (as a part of specific cultural milieu). Dixon interestingly analyses 

and demonstrates how the ideas of the imperialism and superiority of the 

white race were widely used in children´s fiction. Starting with the 

eighteenth- century The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe he shows how the 

nineteenth century became “the heyday of the imperial tradition in 

children´s literature” (ibid., p. 79). Since then, children´s fiction has shown 

colonial exploitation and its “ideological justification” perceived today as 

ethically unacceptable (ibid., p. 74). It is interesting how the analyses of 

works such as Morryat´s Masterman Ready, Kingsley´s Westward Ho!, 

Ballantyne´s Coral Island and Kipling´s Stalky & Co show the typical elements 

of colonial politics taking the side of the oppressor. In this way Dixon 

presents how Frederick Marryat (1792-1848), W. H. G. Kingston (1814-80), 

Charles Kingsley (1819-75), R. M. Ballantyne (1825-94), G. A. Henty (1832- 

1902), H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925), R. Kipling (1865-1936) and many others 

helped to create a long tradition of an adventure story in which the 

dominance of white British culture is significantly overt. 

Two basic notions must be taken into account when discussing this kind of 

fiction. The first notion is that books helped to sustain and justify the social 

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order of the time; we may even add that they were powerful, delicate tools 

serving as subtle propaganda. Dixon also hints at the manipulative function of 

texts when he stresses that “it seems impossible to subject people to an alien 

rule without believing in their inferiority” (ibid., p. 76). Of course, the whole 

ideological concept of racial supremacy is much more complex; one, 

however, cannot deny that literature used to be a vital means of the spread 

and support of such ideas. Putting what might be called the philosophy of 

whiteman-superiority (based on the presupposition of the truth of such a 

position) in children´s fiction inevitably lead to the further justification of the 

discourse. Political and cultural dominance went hand in hand. As Dixon 

further mentions: “Violence and sadism of all kinds, as a matter of fact, are 

rife in imperialist literature for children and usually it´s cloaked in religion, 

racism, or patriotism, or combination of these” (ibid., pp. 77-78). In the 

depiction of slavery, the treatment of native peoples and cultural encounters 

of the past, a white man´s world is strikingly and unquestionably the only 

right one and almost any means it uses to justify the notion is accepted. 

It is true that for the modern reader these concepts of the everyday 

reality of the past seem unnatural, artificial and absurd. The second notion is, 

however, that one must not forget the concepts which are now perceived as 

prejudicial and racial were strongly embedded in society and to question 

them at the time was a social challenge often resulting in ostracism of the 

individual. Consequently, children´s works obviously reflected the then 

socially and politically acceptable rules and behaviour towards the 

supposedly inferior. 

Typical for this type of fiction are mainly the unquestioned racial 

hierarchy, a strong impact of religion, clashes with other imperial powers and 

rather stereotypical portrayal of the slave characters. Bob Dixon makes his 

analysis more challenging showing that even in Roald Dahl´s Charlie and the 

Chocolate Factory – one would say an altogether ínnocent´ book in terms of 

political references -, the echoes of colonialism still resonate. Two editions of 

the book – the original United States edition of 1964 and the first British 

edition, slightly differ. Let us quote some of Dixon´s fascinating observations: 

“In those earlier editions, the children exclaim, on first seeing the Oompa- 

Loompas, ´Their skin is almost black!´(not rosy-white´) and Wonka explains, 

´Right!... Pygmies they are! Imported from Africa!´ Ńow, neither “Africa” nor 

“Pygmies” are mentioned in the Penguin edition and nor are Wonka´s 

original details of the immigrant or guest-workers given: Í brought them over 

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from Africa myself – the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found 

them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no 

white man had ever been before.´ In the original edition, the Oompa- 

Loompas are illustrated as being black, unlike either of the other editions” 

(ibid., p. 112). 

The works of the abovementioned authors (maybe with the exception of 

Defoe and Kipling) are almost forgotten by modern readers and sentenced to 

oblivion due to the minor artistic qualities of the texts. Regardless, we think 

that however uninteresting and boring they might seem today, literary 

criticism definitely should not turn a blind eye to them. We claim that a close 

observation and contextual interpretation of such works may help to show 

the framework of the cultural constructs of the past. It is important not to 

forget the contexts in which the then literary works were created – and thus 

justified – but at the same time to observe what the justification meant and 

how it was achieved in literature. 

Cultures and multiculturalism in modern children´s literature 

It is clear that the debate about the relation between culture and 

(children´s/young adult) literature is inescapable and inevitable today. Due to 

its powerful presence and dominance in scholarly talks and discussion it is 

rather interesting that The Cambridge Companion to Children´s Literature 

edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (2009) does not deal with the 

issues of contemporary cultural encounters in children´s literature at all. A 

slightly surprising fact is very clearly and easily explained in the preface 

where the editors mention that “To attempt to give multicultural children´s 

literature the attention it deserves, as well as to include discussion of other 

national traditions, would have broadened the volume´s scope, but only at 

the expense of trivializing these important issues” (ibid., p. xiv). The absence 

thus does not suggest the minor position of multicultural texts within 

children´s and young adult literature but quite the opposite. It is already so 

important that its study deserves particular attention and scholarship. 

Having seen the proof of the significance and relevance of such literature, 

let us have a look at another recent book on children´s literature, namely in 

Modern Children´s Literature (2005) edited by Kimberley Reynolds and how 

the issue is treated there. The key chapter discussing culture and children´s 

literature (“Postmodernism, New Historicism and Migration: New Historical 

Novels”) is written by Pat Pinsent. The author of the chapter emphasises the 

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significance of children´s and young adult books dealing with multicultural 

issues or any cultural encounters, stating that “One of the most rapidly 

growing areas in children´s literature in recent decades is fiction that deals 

with the experiences of young people, past and present, who for a variety of 

reasons find themselves caught between cultures” (Pinsent, 2005, p. 173). 

Though the author does not provide us with the precise definition of culture, 

further depiction of such literary works gives us certain clues. Pinsent 

continues: “Often these are accounts of children and adolescents whose 

families have been forced to migrate to new countries as a consequence of 

war, economic necessity, or oppression. Some reflect the experiences of those 

whose countries have been invaded and/or colonized” (ibid., p. 173, emphasis 

mine). In other words, here in the first case the cultural encounters refer to 

the immigrant novel and in the second case represent war or postcolonial 

narratives. Pinsent thus limits her study to what might be called political 

fiction for children. 

A significantly broader characterisation is offered by Pamela Gates and 

Dianne Hall Mark (2006): “[Multicultural] literature [is] a body of literature 

that spans all literary genres but generally focuses on primary characters who 

are members of underrepresented groups whose racial, ethnic, religious, 

sexual orientation, or culture historically has been marginalized or 

misrepresented by the dominant culture” (Gates and Mark, 2006, p. 3, 

quoted in Sanders, 2009, p. 194). This basically proclaims that multicultural 

literature would include any form of expression of the marginalized, and 

though the definition gives primary importance to racial and ethnic 

difference, it also covers the sensitive question of sexuality, which is 

occasionally excluded from multiculturalism. 

Obviously, multicultural literature is an umbrella term and its recent boom 

in Britain and especially in the US must also be perceived as a part of the 

huge cultural, social and demographic changes of the modern world. 

According to the 2003 statistics conducted by the National Centre for 

Education Statistics (2005), forty-two per cent of all pupils and students in 

American state schools came from cultural minorities. Another survey has 

revealed that the parent of one child out of five was not born in the States. 

American education on all levels stresses the use of literature written either 

by authors coming from various cultural backgrounds or literature depicting 

other cultures as such. The recent trend unquestionably reflects cultural 

diversity and demographic changes in American society with the constant 

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emphasis on the importance of multiculturalism and multicultural education 

as the key theme of the American school curriculum. As Brown and Stephens 

(1995) point out, students become more open and consequently more 

tolerant towards culturally distinct groups after learning about their customs 

and traditions. 

Literary works mapping cultural diversity and various forms and problems 

of cultural encounter have been a coherent part of American literature for 

adults for a very long time. A similar process has been going on in American 

literature for children and young adults depicting the experience of an 

African-American (E. J. Gaines, W. D. Myers, J. Spinelli), Hispanic (G. Soto, C. 

Meyer, G. Paulsen, S. Cisneros, A. F. Ada) or Asian child (L. Crew, K. Mori, R. 

Sasaki, L. Namioka) in a culturally distinct society. Jewish culture (I. B. Singer) 

and the culture of Native Americans (C. L. Smith, M. Dorris, W. Hobbs) have 

become rich sources for inspiration as well. In most cases cultures are 

confronted with the American cultural majority, or with other minority 

cultures. The authors depict cultural encounters of children or young adults 

who search and fight for their identity and social and cultural acceptance. 

They face racial prejudice, hatred and are often culturally marginalised in the 

new cultural milieu. In most cases authors stress the universal values across 

cultures common to all people. Many literary works emphasize the 

importance of tolerance, humanity, openness, the rights of children and 

education which would eliminate stereotypical thinking and prejudices. 

What to read? 

Anyone even slightly familiar with multicultural literature in English knows 

very well that the number of books published every year is enormous and, 

frankly, truly impossible to grasp in a complex way. In order to answer the 

stated question we have to search for some help. Besides a few useful web 

pages recommending books for children and young adults, and general 

literary awards which may also be given to authors writing about cultural 

encounters, there are also special literary awards which may be a very useful 

guide in the ocean of contemporary literature production. 

At least two major American literary awards must be mentioned which 

serve to promote ethnic writers: The Coretta Scott King Award, given by the 

ALA´s Ethnic Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table annually to 

African American authors and illustrators for outstanding contributions to 

literature for children and young adults since 1970, and The Pura Belpre 

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Award, established in 1996 and given to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator 

of literature for children and young adults. The first award recipients include 

Christopher Paul Curtis, Julius Lester, Toni Morrison, Nikki Grimes, Mildred 

Taylor, Virginia Hamilton and Walter Dean Myers, while Victor Martinez, 

Alma Flor Ada, Pam Muniz Ryan, Francisco Jiménez, Julia Alvarez and Yuyi 

Morales were among others given The Pura Belpre Award. 

Just to suggest the genre spectrum of contemporary production it is not 

only fiction and novels which reflect cultural experience. There are many 

genres and what we offer is just a minute selection of what is being 

produced. (We do apologize for not including a powerful area of picture 

books which would require a special study itself.) A very interesting 

phenomenon has been bilingual books; e.g. C. L. Garza: In my family/En mi 

familia (San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1996). Bilingual books have 

been published also by the team consisting of Aneona, George, with Alma 

Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy: Mis Bailes/My Dances (La serie Somos latinos) 

(2004), or Mi Escuela/My School (La serie Somos latinos) (2004). The former 

is told from the perspectives of five children and shows cultural specifics of 

dancing traditions. The book, illustrated with photographs, also contains a 

glossary and a part “We Are Latinos” depicting the history of Latin American 

dancing. In the latter book, for elementary pupils, a small boy Christopher 

encounters cultural diversity and immigration. There are again photographs 

and the visual aspect of the book is even emphasized through Christopher´s 

áuthentic´ drawings. The book Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel/Si Lakas at 

Ang Makibaka Hotel (2006), written by Anthony D. Robles and illustrated by 

Carl Angel, depicts a young Pilipino boy, Lakas, who also faces cultural 

discrimination and learns the significance of being aware of differences 

between people. 

When discussing multicultural poetry, a long list of works may be offered, 

too. However, as Richard Flynn emphasizes we are still waiting for the classic 

and masterpiece in the field: “Anthologies of African-American poetry, such 

as those by Arnold Adoff or Ashley Bryan, British-Caribbean anthologies, such 

as those by Grace Nichols and John Agard, or Noami Shihab Nye´s anthologies 

of poems from the Middle East are all necessary steps in moving towards a 

culturally inclusive canon or in developing a counter-canon” (2009, p. 82). To 

mention just a few names and titles published relatively recently, one may 

include the collection edited by W. Hudson: Pass it on: African-American 

poetry for children (New York: Scholastic, 1993). Talking Drums: A Selection of 

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Poems from Africa South of the Sahara is a collection edited by Veronique 

Tadjo. The book, which was published in 2004 by Bloomsbury (New York), is 

for child readers from ten years and upwards. The anthology, which has folk 

art illustrations, represents the oral traditions of sub-Saharan Africa and the 

poems included celebrate nature, beauty and the people of Africa. Red Hot 

Salsa is a book edited by Lori Marie Carlson and was published in 2005. The 

bilingual collection deals with subjects such as family, language, culture and 

identity. Poets presented include Gary Soto, Gina Valdes and Amiris 

Rodriguez. Jorge Argueta is the author of Talking with Mother 

Earth/Hahlando con Madre Tierra – a book illustrated by Lucia Angel Perez 

and published in 2006. Its poems express what it means to be an Indian in the 

society of El Salvador. As the title suggests this is again a bilingual book, and 

in it the author describes in simple poems his love for nature, culture and his 

feelings at being culturally discriminated and marginalized. 

In the case of short stories we would like to mention a collection edited by 

Donald R. Galio First Crossing: Stories About Teen Immigrants published in 

2004. The book offers a wide spectrum of immigrant stories from China, 

Romania, Palestine, Sweden, Mexico, Haiti, Cambodia, etc. Well-known 

authors discuss forms of social and cultural conflicts; they depict how 

teenagers experience often extremely difficult circumstances and highlight 

the individual power to struggle with overt hatred and prejudice. Three 

Wishes: Palestianian and Israeli Children Speak, by Deborah Ellis, was also 

published in 2004. The author interviewed several children from Israel and 

Palestine which obviously makes these stories very personal and authentic 

and the voices we hear are full of fears, but also hope. 

An interesting and thought-provoking collection of short stories, Free?: 

Stories Celebrating Human Rights, was published in 2009 by Amnesty 

International to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal 

Declaration of Human Rights. The contributing authors, David Almond, 

Ibtisam Barakat (a Palestinian author living in the US), Malorie Blackman, 

Theresa Breslin, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Ursula Dubosarsky, Jamila Gavin, 

Patricia McCormick, Margaret Mahy, Michael Morpurgo, Sarah Mussi, Meja 

Mwangi (a Kenyan novelist) and Rita Williams-Garcia are all well-known, 

distinguished and awarded writers of children´s or young adult fiction. The 

collection is said to be aimed at young adults though we think that most 

stories suit a younger reader more and might be too preachy for a teenager. 

The stories are very straightforward in their educational function and each 

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short story is followed by the specific article/s of the Declaration which 

has/have been referred to in the preceding text. The naivety and rather 

explicit political messages of the texts raise the question whether a child/a 

teenager would choose the book and whether the collection is not merely 

culturally-aware and politically correct educational material. 

It is obvious that a collection thematically focusing on human rights would 

depict multicultural relations. The celebrated author of British children´s 

literature, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, in the foreword to the book, suggests 

that cultural encounters indeed play a major role in human rights issues. She 

recalls her childhood reading The Diary of Anne Frank at twelve, the 

experience which brought her to realize that it is precisely the power of 

literature which may show children, in a suitable way, what life in other 

countries looks like, and that to be culturally different often means to be 

marginalized, discriminated and oppressed. The collection consists of stories 

depicting immigrant experience and struggles with assimilation (Klaus Vogel 

and Bad Lads), there are stories set in countries where children suffer 

because of political oppression (If Only Papa Hadn´t Danced), their social and 

cultural background (After the Hurricane) or stories showing various forms of 

cultural prejudice and discrimination (Scout´s Honour). 

The first story, by David Almond, is called Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads 

and illustrates the first Article of the Declaration: “We are all born free and 

equal. We all have our own thoughts and ideas. We should all be treated in 

the same way.” The story takes us to post-war Britain where Klaus Vogel, a 

boy smuggled in the boot of a car from East Germany, has to face a group of 

thirteen-year-old English boys. Klaus, who has just escaped one oppressive 

regime, is unwillingly thrown into another one, as the boys in the gang he is 

to join follow and obey their leader Joe Gillespie blindly and unquestioningly. 

Joe represents everything they admire. With his long hair, dates with girls, 

and physical power he easily positions himself at/ the top of the gang 

hierarchy. When Joe stubbornly decides to go on with the activities against 

the social outcast Mr Eustace (who refused to fight in WWII), the group – 

except for Klaus – shamefully agrees. It is obvious that Gillespie´s radicalism 

has its roots in his family. Joe repeatedly mentions what his father would do, 

what he would think, how he would react, and so on. It is clear that his 

ádult´ opinion about Mr Eustace is indeed an adult one – just a verbatim 

copy of his father’s and when Joe scorns their neighbour he simply repeats 

what he heard at home: “He was a coward and a conchie. And like me dad 

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says – once a conchie…” (Almond, 2009, p. 15). “It´s like me dad says,” (…) 

“He should´ve been drove out years back” (ibid., p. 25). The whole story is 

thus built up upon the father–son relationship. Joe and his father stand for 

extreme radicalism, while both the narrator and his father are indifferent at 

first: “Nobody knew the full truth, said my dad, not when it happened so far 

away and in countries like that. Just be happy we lived in a place like this 

where we could go about as we pleased” (ibid., p. 17). Quite expectedly, 

when he sees Mr Eustace the next day, he justifies the destruction of his 

hedge and belonging to Joe´s gang, paradoxically blaming Eustace – and again 

with father´s thoughts: “You´re useless! What did you expect? You should 

have started a new life somewhere else!” (ibid., p. 17). Klaus, a parentless 

child, naturally feels a close affinity to Eustace. Both culturally oppressed, 

they show others what the values of freedom are, and why cultural 

marginalization is the subtle vermin of any society. Almond emphasizes in the 

story the impact of adults as role models on children. Directly presented 

through three character pairs, it is clear that the stress lies in family 

education; expressed significantly in the ´like father, like son´ proverb. 

School Slave, by Theresa Breslin, depicts a spoilt boy who hates school, 

often plays truant and considers himself a slave. There is obvious reshaping 

of language – and devaluing the power of meaning - as for him the institution 

of education represents the worst form of slavery. At one point, a discovered 

message lures him into skiving again, but this time the adventure leads him 

to a hut where he discovers kids being kept as slave workers, and the boy is 

thus confronted with a real form of modern slavery. Functioning as an 

epiphany for the boy, the child protection officer informs him about the child 

abuse which is still going on, and in which innocent children – who would 

much rather have preferred school slavery – have to suffer just because of 

their Third World background: “Organized criminals buy children in Third 

World countries, promising their parents that they´ll get an education and 

employment. Some are trafficked into the UK and kept hidden in out-of-theway 

places so no one will find them” (Breslin, 2009, p. 43). School suddenly 

appears more of a privilege than an institution of oppression. 

In Patricia McCormick´s If Only Papa Hadn´t Danced, a family has to flee 

from the oppressive Zimbabwean regime in April, 2008, when thousands of 

people had to escape the country. Though the first results had indicated the 

defeat of the president and had given hope of change to many, the election 

recount nevertheless stated that Robert Mugabe had won. McCormick´s 

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story elaborates upon Article 14: “If we are frightened of being badly treated 

in our own country, we all have the right to run away to another country to 

be safe” and tackles the serious issues of freedom of speech and political 

oppression. Quite similarly, in Jojo Learns to Dance, by Meja Mwangi, we are 

taken to an anonymous African country where election campaign fever is just 

occurring. The young Jojo is a fervent observer listening to Popo the Wise 

who teaches him why the right to vote is important and why one should use 

it. 

The analysed collection – with its thematic focus and direct message that 

the problems children all around the world face are very often the same 

universal ones based on cultural prejudices and ignorance – has opened a 

very challenging and interesting question regarding adult´s responsibility or - 

better said – willingness to shape children. We decided to use some of the 

short stories from the collection in our children´s literature university course 

and it was very useful and interesting to observe the reactions of mostly 

Slovak students - future teachers - towards such texts. Some of their 

reactions were very restrained claiming that such serious political topics are 

not suitable for any children, and they would not use the texts in class. 

Besides that, they also criticized the very obvious preaching and teaching 

character of the stories and the direct instruction how to behave in order to 

be a good citizen and, of course, the stories aimed to be absolutely politically 

correct. 

It is natural that adults have their say in the selection of books for 

children, though we do think that the process of erasing anything which may 

be even potentially dangerous for the child reader is not the way forward. 

Putting aside children´s reviews of books, we already mentioned hundreds of 

web pages with various reading lists recommending multicultural books 

obviously created by adults and based on their ideas what should and should 

not be read. As Deborah Stevenson notes: “This adult mediation tends to 

treat books and reading on the nutritional model, operating on the theory 

that children, left to their own devices, will tend to consume junk, but that 

tactful adult assistance will lead them to partake of equally enjoyable and 

much more healthful fodder. This mediation is justified by the conviction that 

books affect young readers, that children cannot always judge what is and 

isn´t good for them, and that adults have not just a right, but a duty, to 

ensure children´s lack of judgment does not result in harm” (2009, p. 109). As 

a helping tool for teachers and parents there is even a list of “10 quick ways 

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to analyze children´s books for racism and sexism” approved by The Council 

on Interracial Books for Children. We leave readers to decide upon the merits 

of its criteria and requirements for the selection of books suitable for children 

and young adults. 

1. Check illustrations for stereotypes or tokenism. Determine if the cultures 

presented are oversimplified (“blacks are the happy-go-lucky, 

watermelon-eating Sambo” or of “Chicanos, the sombrero-wearing peon 

or fiesta-loving macho bandito”. Determine if racial minority characters 

are stereotypically presented and if minorities play subservient or 

leadership roles. 

2. Check storyline focusing on the standard for success (Does it require 

“white” behavior for the minority character to succeed?), the resolution 

of the problem (Who solves the problem and how?), and the role of 

women (Do the women succeed because of initiative and intelligence 

versus appearance?). 

3. Check lifestyles avoiding “cute-natives-in-costumes” syndrome. 

4. Check relationships between people determining who holds the power or 

takes a leadership role and focusing on family dynamics as appropriate. 

5. Check hero traits. Ask “Whose interest is a particular hero really 

serving?” 

6. Check effects on a child´s self image. Determine if norms are established 

that hinder a child´s aspirations or self-concept. Ask if there is at least 

one character with whom a child can easily identify that uses positive 

traits throughout the story. 

7. Check author´s or illustrator´s background by reading the biographical 

information on the book jacket. Determine their qualifications on the 

topic. 

8. Check author´s perspective asking if the perspective is patriarchal or 

feminist and if minority cultural perspectives appear. 

9. Watch for loaded words (words with insulting overtones such as 

“savage”, “crafty”. “docile”, or “backward”) or sexist language (for 

example – chairperson versus chairman, firefighters versus fireman, 

manufactured versus manmade). 

10. Check copyright date. Non-sexist books “were rarely published before 

1973” while multiracial books that correctly represented multicultural 

realities did not appear until the early 1970s. 

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Reading the list of criteria, there are some problems which might occur as 

a result of this approach, such as positive discrimination, artificial and 

unnatural constructions in literary texts (if authors take the list into 

consideration), the problem of reshaping and rewriting history so that no one 

would be offended, and even deleting history if we take point 10 seriously. 

We will leave point seven with no comment at all. Whether we admit it or 

not, what we face here is a very direct censorship. It is more than clear that 

when the artistic value of literature is suppressed, there is a danger of the 

text becoming just a political tool. When judging and analyzing any book 

dealing with cultural encounters, the literary qualities of the text should be 

regarded as a matter of course. While it is understandable to agree with the 

proposal: “We do care what our kids read!”, we must be very careful of how 

we approach the text so that literature will not become just a scrutinised 

propaganda. Furthermore, raising the level of critical thinking in our pupils 

and students (and discussing the texts with them) is a much better 

investment of time than worshipping extreme political correctness which has 

been a recent trend in many literary genres. 

Why to read? 

We started the study with the notion that children´s and young adult 

literatures reflect culture and the issues of cultural life in a specific time, and 

this is definitely true about modern multicultural literature. Though more 

time is needed to fill the classics bookshelves, one cannot question the 

multicultural boom of recent years. Comparing today´s literature with the 

past, “when the genre´s subject sand authors were rarely identifiable as 

anything other than white and heterosexual” (Stevenson, 2009, p. 116), one 

must inevitably marvel at the colourful plethora of children´s literary works 

which have been recently created. It is normal that the recent growth in the 

production of literature for children and young adults with the themes 

related to cultural aspects of life and various forms of cultural encounter has 

naturally led to a sharp increase in its use in schools at all levels of the British 

and American education systems ; and subsequently to English and American 

university departments worldwide. 

The analysis and examples of the syllabi designed specifically to study and 

use multicultural children´s literature in teaching will help us to understand 

the key notions and answer the question Why read?. For this we used syllabi 

available on the internet, particularly: Multicultural Children´s Literature 

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prepared by Professor Carolyn Sigler from San Jose State University; 

Introduction to Multicultural Children´s Literature prepared by Dr. Annette 

Wannaker from Children´s Literature Studies at Eastern Michigan University; 

and Multicultural Children´s Literature prepared by Terri Wheeler from 

California State University, Monterey Bay. 

Several perspectives are to be taken into consideration with the question 

WHY read/study multicultural literature. The first important emphasis – and 

already a partial answer - is the personal development of the reader, which 

stresses the educative function of literature. Of course, the texts are written 

primarily for children and young adults as the primary addressees; however, 

it is stressed as equally important for the development of university students, 

i.e. future teachers. For instance, Terri Wheeler from California State 

University suggests: “Reading, understanding, discussing, and analyzing 

literature written from diverse ethnic, linguistic, and cultural perspectives 

provides students the opportunity to make important connections across and 

within groups that can facilitate and expand the reading and writing skills of 

children as well as their view of what it means to be human.” Thus, Professor 

Carolyn Sigler from San Jose State University uses the passage from Richard 

E. Ishler's "The Preparation of Elementary School Teachers," which appeared 

in the Spring 1995 Phi Kappa Phi Journal, to emphasize the importance of 

multicultural literature: “Persons who will spend their professional lives as 

elementary school teachers must be liberally and broadly educated, more so 

than individuals with other careers, because of their positions as role models 

for our children - positions that are crucial not only to the students whose 

lives are directly affected, but to the general society as well. Other than a 

student's parents, no other person has such an opportunity to influence, to 

motivate, and to inspire a child to value the intellectual life. In fact, acting as 

an intellectual role model may well be the single most significant aspect of 

the teaching profession.” (1995, p. 4, emphasises mine) The statement thus 

proclaims the merits of a multicultural text as a cross-over phenomenon 

equally enriching for both a child and a mature reader. Sigler notes further 

on: “Through the readings, lectures and our class discussions you will develop 

your awareness of social and pedagogical issues that impact the use of 

children´s literature both in and outside of the classroom, your ability to read 

texts carefully and with attention to their literary merit, and your ability to 

write clear, thoughtful and persuasive prose.” 

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Also Poe emphasizes that “One way to help students develop 

multicultural understanding is to offer them young adult literature with 

characters and/ or situations that are both familiar and unfamiliar. Characters 

or situations readers can identify with enable them to enter stories where 

they meet and learn from characters and situations outside their personal 

experiences” (1998, p. 148). Furthermore, “Multicultural awareness can also 

be sparked by encouraging students to read books about contemporary 

teens from ethnic or racial groups different from the reader´s. Feeling or 

experiences common to adolescence may enable the reader to identify with 

a protagonist and create an interest in that character´s culture. If the 

character develops an interest in his or her own cultural identity, the reader 

can vicariously enter into the heritage of another group. Such an interest may 

lead to further reading of historical fiction or nonfiction related to that ethnic 

group” (ibid., p. 149). 

To relate these questions to the university courses of children´s literature 

in English in Slovakia, we suggest that the very same arguments and 

approaches can be used. It is unquestionable that children´s literature should 

be a part of university preparation for future teachers of English. 

Furthermore, as we observe aspects of modern culture in Britain and the US 

related to demographic changes, and also the increase in the significance of 

multicultural children´s literature reflected in the established literary awards 

- we are convinced that multicultural literature should be reflected in the 

syllabi in our cultural context as well. Besides that, as it has been suggested 

multicultural literature promotes universal values and thus we assume that 

its use may generally help to raise cultural awareness in students (future 

teachers) and thus to prepare them better for the life in a globalized and 

culturally challenging world. And last, but not least, our experience has also 

proven that teachers of English at the primary and secondary level of 

education have very little knowledge of the children´s and young adult 

literature texts in English which they could use in the classroom as authentic 

material to work with. In this way, information about multicultural literature 

may be also very useful and practical for the practice of teaching as such. 

How to read? 

There are two basic ways in which multicultural literature can be 

approached at the university level and the following discourse will be 

concerned mostly with Slovak university students. First, there is a 

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methodological approach, which means literature discussed and presented as 

a material for further use in the class. As we all know, multicultural literature 

plays a key role in the preparation of future teachers, especially in the US, 

where it can be found as a separate university course on a very frequent 

basis. In many other countries, children´s literature is studied as a part of 

English language and literature studies, and multicultural literature for 

children and young adults in English is usually a part of general courses on 

children´s literature, and is therefore only discussed in a few seminars during 

the semester. As a methodological means, multicultural children´s literature 

is therefore used not only in teaching English and in developing reading skills, 

but also as a very effective cross-curricular means and tool. With its emphasis 

on cultural diversity, it is easy to find and make links with geography, arts, 

social studies, history, civics, etc. In claiming this, we emphasise the 

educative function as we expect a child/student would find useful, new and 

coherent information which might be later used and contextualised. We think 

that this approach is the one which may be very practical for future teachers 

of English in the Slovak educational system, too. With the call for 

interdisciplinarity and linking subjects, multicultural books are an excellent 

way in which to present and actually use authentic materials, and to teach 

English and acquire information from other fields as well. This approach, of 

course, means that a lecturer will present and offer examples of books and 

will also show how they can be used in the classroom. 

On the other hand, we would be much more careful with the second 

approach, which is a scholarly treatment of children’s literature texts 

subjected to literary criticism. The field is relatively new even in the Englishspeaking 

countries, and there has only been a very short tradition of scholarly 

research of children’s and young adult literature in English in Slovakia. This 

basically means that since we are only just starting this kind of research, we 

should be also very careful with the way in which students approach it. For 

the time being, we would suggest to keep with the methodological approach 

while not forgetting about artistic qualities and discussions about literary 

devices of the texts. It is important that students have a general knowledge 

of this area of literature, and that they are familiar with authors, themes but 

also questions and challenges which its reception brings. 

Multicultural graphic narratives 

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There has been a recent rapid growth in the popularity and production of 

graphic narratives in English, and publishing companies offer many appealing 

books. This part deals specifically with the graphic narratives which present a 

variety of multicultural themes and issues, and as multicultural literature 

includes not only racial, ethnic and religious difference, we also discuss books 

depicting other forms of marginalization, such as the sexual and political. We 

introduce books which have gained wider attention and appeal, and we 

definitely do not propose the suggested account as a complete list of 

significant graphic narratives of recent years. 

A graphic novel is often quite wrongly referred to as a specific genre; 

while it is the form which distinguishes it from other narratives. The graphic 

narrative as an umbrella term covers multiple genres including fantasy, 

memoir, gay stories, adventure stories, spy stories, and so on. Generally 

speaking, the terminology in the field is still quite vague and graphic 

narratives often appear under other labels. For example, Persepolis by 

Marjane Satrapi is referred to as “graphic memoir, graphic biography, graphic 

book, comic book, picture novella, etc.” (see Malek, 2006, p. 354). Some 

authors even suggest that the term graphic narrative is more appropriate 

than the graphic novel, since the novel suggests a longer text, while the 

graphic narrative may include a wider spectrum of works. In our case, we use 

both terms, as all works discussed belong to both categories. 

Until very recently, graphic novels had a very ambiguous position in the 

general context of texts. One surely recalls the problems caused by 

Spiegelman´s Maus which still in 1992 represented a medium almost 

impossible to categorize. Thus, Thomas Doherty explains: “The obvious rubric 

(Biography) seemed ill-suited for a comic book in an age when ever-larger 

tomes and ever-denser scholarship define that enterprise. Editorial 

cartooning didn´t quite fit either, for Maus illustrated not the news of the day 

but events of the past. The classification problem had earlier bedevilled the 

New York Times Book Review, where the work had criss-crossed the Fiction 

and Non-Fiction Best Seller Lists” (1996, p. 69). Confusing reactions came 

from the publishers´ side in the late 1990s when Judd Winick offered his 

graphic novel Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learnt (2000) to 

several companies to meet only lukewarm and hesitating responses. Winick 

explains: “Everybody loved it, but nobody wanted to publish it. They didn´t 

want to touch a graphic novel. Jill kept plugging along and at one point I 

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thought of self-publishing it. But after 30 publishers rejected it, we found 

Marc Aronson” (quoted in Maughan, 2000, p. 37). 

While traditionally on the margin of scholarly interests, graphic narratives 

have started to gain in significance in terms of publication, as well as in 

scholarly research. Several contemporary books exemplify the interpretation 

and reception of the graphic novel format, including Paul Gravett´s Graphic 

Novels: Stories to Change Your Life published in 2005. The book Gravett – for 

a long time associated with the British alt-comics movement - analyses 30 key 

graphic novels and suggests more titles for further reading. Among other 

influential works on graphic novels one must at least mention the already 

classic Understanding Comics (1993), by Scott McCloud, and the 2007 This 

Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature by Rocco Versaci. Due 

to their visual and verbal complexity, graphic novels require a specific 

approach, and definitely an interdisciplinary one. In order to discuss the issue 

adequately, knowledge of other fields (including art history, media and the 

theory of communication) is essential. In particular, this may bring certain 

misinterpretations when approaching graphic novels, and we think that their 

supposed straightforwardness can easily turn into a double-edged sword, 

causing undesirably shallow analyses. As Hatfield observes: “Despite their 

reputed simplicity, then, comics present daunting complexities on many 

levels—aesthetic, semiotic, historical, cultural, disciplinary, institutional—and 

so are potentially as challenging to scholars as any cultural form” (2008, p. 

130). As he further notes: “Positing comics as literature (…) represents a 

challenge to the structuring assumptions of literary studies itself” (ibid., p. 

131). 

It is important to emphasize that the implied readership of graphic novels 

has a broader span, as the books are very popular with adult readers as well 

as with teenagers and children, and thus belong in the cross-over area par 

excellence. As Rachel Cooke points out, graphic novels are not an adolescent 

form anymore, and the quality of today´s books makes it a respectable (the 

biggest publisher in the UK is Cape) and popular form among literary 

celebrities including Zadie Smith and Nick Hornby (2006, p. 74). Of course, 

there are graphic novels designed specifically for children and, on the other 

hand, those primarily addressed to adult readers, but most of them – offering 

more layers of meaning - appeal to a universal readership. Generally 

speaking, visual narratives, such as picture books, or, in our case, graphic 

novels, document that the form does not necessarily imply the reader, and 

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forms traditionally regarded for children and young adults often aim at a 

wider spectrum of readers. However, it must be emphasized that even 

though crucial changes in the reception of graphic narratives have emerged, 

there are still certain ambiguities around them. For instance, Marjane 

Satrapi´s Persepolis – definitely a cross-over book – received awards for 

children´s and young adult fiction thus limiting it to this age-specific audience 

(it was the winner of the 2004 ALA Alex Award, and was included as a YALSA 

Best Book for Young Adults, Booklist Editor’s Choice for Young Adults, the 

New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, and the School Library 

Journal Adult Books for Young Adults) (see Malek, 2006, p. 366). 

To prove the ambiguous, but also essential, feature of its cross-over 

characteristics we will shortly discuss two graphic narratives reflecting the 

Iraq invasion in 2003. Both books, namely Mark Alan Stamaty´s graphic novel 

Alia´s Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq (2004) and Jeanette Winter´s picture 

book The Librarian of Basra: A True Story of Iraq (2005) were inspired by the 

2003 rescue of an Iraqi´s library books. As a librarian, Alia Muhammad Baker 

(Baqir) managed to smuggle an enormous 70 per cent (30,000 books out of 

40,000 books) from Basra Central Library to her home just a couple of days 

before the library burnt down. Thematically, both books stress the 

importance of cultural heritage and the educative function is rather obvious 

(Stamaty´s 32 pages even offer an afterword about historical libraries in the 

Middle East which enriches the overall cultural context of the story) and the 

books are sometimes recommended as an introduction to the current 

conflict. While criticising both books for political incorrectness and bias, El- 

Tamami, in his review, praises specifically the attention given to a minute, 

but influential detail from the New York Times article covering the rescue of 

books: “One of the most striking details in the original article, a detail that 

was incorporated into Alia’s Mission, is that some of the people who helped 

to rescue the Basra Central Library collection did not – indeed, could not – 

read. Yet somehow they understood the vital importance of what they were 

carrying to safety. They rallied to an urgent call, a survival instinct – not of an 

individual, but of a cultural collective” (2009, p. 349). Although depicting a 

politically extremely sensitive and still current conflict, the books aim 

primarily at a young reader. Stamaty himself – quoted in Mattson´s article 

comments: “I knew I wasn’t making a political cartoon and I didn’t really want 

to introduce some kind of partisan political view” (2005, p. 958). 

Consequently, it is quite interesting to observe how the spectrum of readers 

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is covered. One would expect that a graphic novel would address older 

readers, while Winter´s picture book would be for the younger ones, which is 

also supported by Mattson´s comment on Stamati´s book: “His editors were 

convinced that the graphic novel form would appeal to the broadest possible 

audience and would express the story’s complexities more completely than a 

traditional picture book” (ibid., p. 958). On the other hand, in a different 

place she also emphasises that “Younger readers will be instantly drawn by 

the story's anthropomorphic book emcee, but this sophisticated and timely 

work will also appeal to older admirers of Spiegelman's Maus books” (ibid., p. 

26). Interestingly enough, in El-Tamami´s review Alia´s Mission is criticised as 

“confused about its target audience: combining language which is not 

calibrated to a younger readership with an anthropomorphic creature that 

would only appeal to very small children” (2009, p. 350). On the other hand, 

Winter´s picture book and its wider spectrum of readers is stressed: “In a 

couple of deceptively simple pictures and lines, Alia has been introduced, and 

her library is established not as a stuffy storehouse where books go to gather 

dust but as the gathering place of a dynamic cultural community. The chosen 

register of the language is important: it is simple and concise enough to be 

understood on the literal level by the very young, but oblique enough 

(‘matters of the spirit’) to hold the interest of anyone who wishes to delve 

deeper” (ibid., p. 344). 

There are many reasons why graphic narratives appeal to readers. We live 

in a world of the visual image and young people feel comfortable with the 

visually attractive format; graphic narratives are in this way the childrenartefacts 

born of modern culture. This is not a negative thing; quite the 

contrary. No matter how much the advocates of graphic stories talk about 

their complexity (and – repeatedly – we do not deny that, and the works 

discussed are the best proof for the statement), they are definitely easier to 

approach than plain text narratives. This also makes them very appropriate to 

concentrate on the issues of cultural difference and the depiction of 

multicultural society – hot and sensitive topics about which readers of all 

ages should approach and think critically. As Rachel Wilson points out: “With 

the multicultural graphic novel, complex stories can be told without the 

writer having to trivialize his or her narrative” (2006, p. 33). Regardless of the 

popular culture genre status, graphic novels can successfully carry messages 

which might, in other contexts, seem either too banal, or too complicated. 

The expressive means are simply different, which creates vast possibilities to 

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e-tell and re-create in order to offer new perspectives in a cultural sphere 

where the word has always had a dominant position. The form itself 

inevitably bears specific characteristics and attributes, a fact which may be 

used for its own benefits. Nick Hornby also concludes that “It’s not possible, 

[…], for a graphic novel to be as patiently and complicatedly internal as the 

best fiction, but then, that’s not possible for cinema, either. But the best 

graphic novels are punchy, immediately emotional, capable of sudden, 

surprising tonal shifts, and more likely to make you laugh than a lot of literary 

novels” (Hornby cited in Cooke, 2006, p. 75). 

Visual imagery certainly crosses cultures more easily than textual 

references, and since the mass spread of comic books in the US there have 

been strong attempts to incorporate them into schools and use them as 

study material. However, as Gene Luen Yang – the author of American Born 

Chinese – mentions, the trend stopped after the research conducted by a 

psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham, followed by a book “that basically said that 

comics were the cause of juvenile delinquency. After that, in the ‘40s and 

‘50s, many comic-book companies went out of business. American society 

just kind of abandoned it as a legitimate medium” (Engberg, 2007, p. 75). 

Another thing is, as Gene Luen Yang continues, that “ten years ago, people 

were predicting the death of the American comic book” (ibid., p. 75), we can 

definitely see the rebirth of the genre. 

In an extremely rich spectrum of graphic novels for young adults there are 

some significant multicultural books which should be pointed out. As Kuhr 

and Rosenfeld (2005) observe, Hispanic, African American and other ethnic 

characters were present in graphic novels and comic books since time 

immemorial. However, until quite recently, their portrayal was racially 

biased, and extremely stereotyped. Racially distinct characters held inferior, 

degrading positions and they appeared either as supporting characters (the 

White Tiger – the Hispanic hero in the Superman series) or team members 

(Thunderbird, a Native American cofounder of the X-Men) and Falcon – an 

African American appeared in 1969 in Captain America. 

We may also note that the portrayal of characters representing other 

cultures changed with the spread of cultural encounters in the books as such, 

which of course happened parallel with wider social, historical, political and 

ideological changes in western society. To emphasize the quality of any visual 

narrative on a multicultural topic (in this case, for children and young adults) 

El-Tamami summarizes what is essential for a good book: “Two things, I 

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elieve, are paramount. The first is that the story must succeed on its own 

terms as a creative work. Noble intentions alone cannot hold up a poorly 

structured piece or flimsy characterization. The second is that it must convey 

a quality of ‘openness’. As with any good conversation, the parties involved 

do not enter with their minds irreversibly made up and with the sole aim of 

imparting their supreme wisdom. To allow for an exchange, the writer must 

tread lightly, provoking questions rather than presenting pat answers and 

leaving plenty of interpretive and explorative room for the reader. Picture 

books, with their uniquely evocative alchemy of words and images, are, in my 

opinion, an ideal forum for dialogue” (El-Tamami, 2009, p. 344, emphasis 

mine). 

In the following part of the study we will introduce a specific genre within 

graphic narratives: that of graphic memoirs depicting the culturally 

marginalised. The first one is definitely a cult representative of the genre, the 

work by Art Spiegelman, Maus. This will be followed by Marjane Satrapi´s 

Persepolis (first published in English in 2003) and Alison Bechdel´s Fun Home 

(2006). Subsequently, other major publications dealing with multiculturalism 

will follow chronologically, including Ho Che Anderson´s King (1993), Judd 

Winick´s Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learnt (2000) and Gene 

Luen Yang´s American Born Chinese (2006). 

In The Cambridge Companion to Children´s Literature (2009), the chapters 

are preceded with a chronology of the influential works of literature for 

children and young adults. Interestingly, Art Spiegelman´s Maus is included, 

characterised as “a graphic novel with cross-generational appeal” (xxiv). 

Indeed, it is really difficult to label the work which received the 1986 Pulitzer 

Prize; it has changed the perception of graphic writing, and has become a key 

representative not only of novels in pictures, but also of the serious theme it 

discusses. Two volumes, Maus: A Survivor´s Tale – My Father Bleeds History 

(1986) and And Here My Troubles Began (1991), capture the Holocaust in a 

surprising and untraditional way. A format conventionally suited to a teenage 

hobby with made-up grinning monsters, it radically changed the way in which 

historically delicate issues might be tackled. The decision for the comic strip 

was not an easy one. Struggles are also frequently mentioned in the novel 

itself, e.g. when Art thinks about the limits of the picture story: “There´s so 

much I´ll never be able to understand or visualize. I mean, reality is too 

complex for comics... So much has to be left out or distorted” (2003, p. 176). 

Maus is bitter-sweet, authentic and true – a subjective opinion which one 

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soon accepts as a conclusion after reading, an opinion other readers will 

easily agree with as well. There are two basic timelines. The first is the 

narrative of the author´s parents, the line re-created through the memories 

of Art´s father, Vladek – a Holocaust survivor who recalls the tragedy of his 

life in which animal animosity is expressed in cartoons with Jews drawn as 

mice and Nazis as cats. 

The second line of the memoir is the author´s Sisyphean struggle with his 

father to get memories from him and put them into comics, but also to come 

to terms with Vladek´s difficult personality, his often stubborn and 

intransigent attitudes getting on everyone´s nerves, having the manners of 

an old man, obsessed with food (not a crumb wasted) and a mania to keep 

everything for bad times, including money, so much that it drives people 

around him mad. In the third chapter of the second book there is a scene 

when – with Vladek in the car – Francoise and Art stop to take a hitchhiker. 

Vladek reacts: “A hitchhiker? And – oy – it´s a coloured guy, a shvartser! Push 

quick on the gas!” (2003, p. 258). What follows is a waterfall of swearing and 

grumbling, and when Art remarks “That´s outrageous! How can you, of all 

people be such a racist! You talk about blacks the way the Nazis talked about 

the Jews!” it is simply Vladek´s “persuasive” argumentation which proves 

that nothing at all could have changed him. This is one of the most powerful 

parts of the book. Reality is far from being black and white – and it is all those 

darker and brighter hues we must learn about to understand and see the 

world clearly. 

Marjane Satrapi´s Persepolis: Persepolis I: The Story of a Childhood (2003) 

and Persepolis II: The Story of a Return (2004) has gained a strong position 

among graphic narrative output, and it has become one of the most popular 

books of the graphic memoir genre, ever. The story was first published in 

France in 2000 (volumes 1 and 2) selling 20, 000 copies in a single year, 

followed by the 2003 volumes 3 and 4 (Persepolis II in English). More than 

400, 000 books of the series were sold in France, and over a million 

worldwide in the translations which formed two books. After Persepolis was 

published in the US in 2003, comparisons to the also black-and-white Maus 

by Art Spiegelman were immediately drawn. It did not take long, and the film 

version was prepared; directed by Satrapi, with Vincent Parronaud, and with 

the voices of Chiarra Mastroianni (Marji), Catherine Deneuve (Marji’s 

mother), Danielle Darrieux (grandmother), and Simon Abkarian (Marji´s 

father). As Malek explains, the series belongs to the increasing amount of 

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literary works which has started to flourish written by members of the Iranian 

diaspora, and she characterises them as examples of exile cultural 

production: “Community awareness within the Iranian diaspora community 

thus established and growing, the coming-of-age of the second generation 

has been heralded by the publication of numerous memoirs that have 

brought the Iranian diaspora experience to the realm of popular culture” 

(2006, p. 353). Furthermore, “qualitative analysis has revealed that many 

Iranian exiles/immigrants have, since their migration, become much less 

politicized and much more interested in culture” (ibid., p. 358). There are 

many reasons for the popularity of the book in which Satrapi´s black-andwhite 

drawings and simplified illustrations document a coming-of-age story 

set on a backdrop to the often misunderstood history of post-revolutionary 

Iran. Some of them include a seemingly easy accessibility, quick identification 

with Marji, and even as Constantino mentions: “Satrapi’s depiction of Muslim 

leaders as uneducated, primitive, and narrow-minded brutes strengthens her 

connection with her Western readers whose perception of Muslim extremists 

might indeed be quite similar to the one crafted in the autobiography” (2008, 

p. 432). Persepolis represents the narrative “in-between”; on one hand it 

approaches the exotic and usually ignored exotic setting and educates a 

Western reader. On the other hand, as Malek points out, the book is equally 

important for the identity formation of the Iranian diaspora: “Undeniably, 

along with teaching Westerners about Iran and attempting the much-needed 

work of cultural translation and all-identification across cultures, memoirs by 

Iranian women have also served the Iranian diaspora by helping the second 

and third generations understand their cultural history and diasporic 

heritage. During an informal discussion at the most recent International 

Conference on the Iranian Diaspora, in Washington, D.C., a self-selected 

group who identified themselves as second and third generation Iranian- 

Americans offered interesting responses to the recent Iranian memoir boom 

that speaks to this generational significance” (2006, p. 367). The story begins 

as a ten-year-old Marji experiences her first encounters with cultural clashes, 

witnesses the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq, 

moves to Austria, comes back home after her turmoil stay in Europe, and 

finishes as the twenty-four year-old young woman returns to Europe. As 

Malek observes further on: “Throughout both of these experiences, the 

loneliness, recurring identity crises, and feelings of frustration at feeling 

misunderstood everywhere while having a home nowhere become themes of 

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exile and return that are wholly relatable, to Iranian and non-Iranian, 

immigrant and nonimmigrant readers alike—a success made possible 

through the universality of her illustrations” (2006, p. 370). Due to the 

general reception of Satrapi´s book, one may consider it a crucial work in the 

field of multicultural fiction. A child´s perspective and suggestive visual 

means both contribute to the overall appeal of the work to cross-over 

readers. 

Alison Bechdel´s memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) tackles 

the question of sexual identity in the context of a troubled and 

unconventional family life. The author´s first graphic novel won extremely 

positive acclaim, including Time Magazine’s Best Book of 2006. In the work, 

Bechdel depicts a nuclear family, with patriarchal father, Bruce, who wears a 

mask of honesty while his daughter´s lesbianism represents a burden she 

should inevitably get rid of. Bechdel´s memoir is extensively rich in older and 

modern literary allusions, more or less obvious hints referring particularly to 

James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde and Albert Camus. Ariela Freedman 

observes: “In telling her story, Bechdel explicitly places the graphic narrative 

in irreverent, iconoclastic dialogue with literary modernism. In repeatedly 

citing, revising and challenging writers including Joyce, Fitzgerald and Proust, 

she is inviting the reader to read her book alongside theirs and making a 

space for herself on the shelf of modernist literature” (2009, p. 126). The 

work, which interweaves Western cultural tradition, melding its mythological 

background and Modernist literature with contemporary autobiographical 

material, resembles a Joycean attempt, even with the ten years it took 

Bechdel to finish the project. The perspective of a woman, and of a lesbian, 

has not received positive reaction everywhere and – for instance – American 

libraries banned the book because of the explicit pictures of sexual matters. 

Bechdel, with her book, tackles the issues of cultural difference which are 

often ignored - the reason why the book is included in a chapter on 

multicultural graphic narratives for children and young adults. We think that 

her memoir may easily get a warm welcome from the cross-over spectrum - 

with teenagers and young adults as potential readers. The abovementioned 

protests might – according to us – make the book even more appealing for 

these age groups. 

A remarkable book appeared in 1993 by an author-illustrator, Ho Che 

Anderson, which saw the first part of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

published. King was followed by two consequent volumes in 2002 and 2003. 

111

The comic-biographies give a detailed account of King´s life, his relationship 

with Coretta Scott, and his fight for equality. The second part begins in 1958 

and depicts the Birmingham protests, the march on Washington, and the 

immortal “I have a dream” speech. The third volume starts with the JFK 

assassination, captures the death of King in Memphis, where he went in 

support of a garbage-workers´ strike, and questions the present state of 

American society where even after a few decades many of the things that 

worried King are still there. The black and white drawings used accentuate 

the drama, and the comic-book faithfully presents the crucial events of 

American history. 

In Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss and What I Learnt (2000) Judd Winick, a 

professional cartoonist, draws upon his experience of an MTV television 

show the Real World 3: San Francisco, first aired in 1994, where seven young 

strangers became housemates in a reality show recording their life together. 

An autobiographical story, it depicts how Winick meets a young Cuban 

immigrant raised in Miami, Pedro Zamora, an HIV-positive AIDS activist and 

educator. Becoming HIV-positive at 17, he devoted the rest of his life to 

educating others in schools and various public organizations on national 

level. The story thus emphasizes the power of friendship and focuses on the 

dilemma people feel when facing HIV-positive people. It is interesting how – 

despite his politically correct attitude – Zamora confesses his reservations 

about living with an HIV-positive roommate before the show started. When 

the two meet, they gradually become very good friends and it is eventually 

Winick who continues with Pedro´s educatory mission after his death. The 

crucial and very emotive scenes are those depicting their friendship as the 

show finishes, and Judd with his girlfriend Pam are with Pedro when he dies. 

As Pedro had already passed away in 1994, it took Winick a few years to 

finish the book which has become not only a tribute to his late friend, but 

also a powerful educational tool concerning AIDS awareness. As Winick 

emphasises: “There are so many clichés out there about AIDS. I hope that 

people will see what a remarkable person Pedro was. I want them to realize 

that there are so many people out there like him and that this doesn´t have 

to happen – it doesn´t take that much (to prevent the spread of AIDS)” 

(Zamora in Maughan, 2000, p. 37). 

In 2006 Gene Luen Yang published American Born Chinese, a story of a 

young Asian American struggling with his Chinese American identity, 

nominated also for the 2006 National Book Award in the Young People´s 

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Literature section. There are three parallel stories uniquely interwoven at the 

end. The first story is about the Monkey King, a mythical hero from Chinese 

folklore, frequently used by Chinese American authors and representing on 

the one hand resistance and subversion, on the other hand the bridge 

between supposedly distinct cultural worlds. Gene Luen Yang explains his 

interest and inspiration for the character, which resembles him, using the 

immigrant experience: “In a high-school art class, I drew a picture of the 

Monkey King. When I showed it to my mom, she said, ‘You drew it wrong. 

The Monkey King always wears shoes.’ I asked why, and she said, ‘Well, he 

doesn’t really want people to know he’s a monkey.’ That feeling connected 

well with something that I think Asian Americans in particular, and maybe 

immigrants to America in general, struggle with” (Engberg, 2007, p. 75). It 

was only his story that Gene Luen Yang had wanted to write initially, though 

later he decided to put the story into a wider perspective and incorporated 

the old myth into the modern world. In the second narrative, Jin Wang 

(Danny), a Chinese American boy faces hatred and bullying in a suburban 

school where most kids are white; and the third one portrays the highly 

satirized Chin-Kee, an amalgam of the worst stereotypes, who visits Danny 

and turns his life upside down. Gene Luen Yang also explains why he decided 

to make Chin-Kee a sit-com character: “Iconically, the sitcom family is the 

ideal American family, in which the characters are living ideal American lives, 

things get solved within half an hour, and everything’s funny. I think in lots of 

ways that that’s what Asian American kids strive for” (ibid., p. 75). Suggesting 

that there are cultural faults on both sides, Gene Luen Yang also emphasises 

the universality of the human condition, and making fun of the stereotypes, 

he questions the deep-rooted, but often just arbitrary and falsified poses. 

Between childhood and adulthood – the case of Chinese Cinderella 

The Chinese-American author, Adeline Yen Mah, is probably most wellknown 

for her autobiographical story depicted in two bestsellers: Falling 

Leaves: Return to Their Roots, The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese 

Daughter (1997) and Chinese Cinderella: The Secret Story of an Unwanted 

Daughter (1999). Her other literary works include Watching the Tree: A 

Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Traditions, and Spiritual Wisdom 

(2000), A Thousand Pieces of Gold: A Memoir of China’s Past Through Its 

Proverbs (2002) and Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society (2005). 

All of them are related to Yen Mah´s life; they reflect author´s cultural 

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ackground and – among other issues – depict her adult experience of being 

´the other´ in the foreign cultural milieus of Great Britain and the US. The 

texts Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (1997) 

and Chinese Cinderella: The Secret Story of an Unwanted Daughter (1999) tell 

the same story using slightly different discourses and language, since their 

implied readers differ in age. The former, brought out in 1997, aims at adult 

readers while Chinese Cinderella – The Secret Story of an Unwanted Daughter 

(1999) is a story for children published after the great success of its 

predecessor. 

The author Adeline Yen Mah revives the harsh life recollections of a 

Chinese girl, hated, unwanted and rejected by the family, a Cinderella for the 

modern age. The title of the children´s story suggests the universality of a 

folktale-like modern narrative based on the idea that folktales - as rooted in 

the shared experience of the past – are part of the universal cultural heritage. 

Initially belonging to the world of adult oral narratives, there is still 

something enchanting and magical in the universality of the Little Red Riding 

Hood or Cinderella stories with very slightly modified structures found in 

geographically distinct areas. Though born into a rather well-off family in 

Tianjin in 1937, Adeline bears the heavy burden of being the cause of her 

mother´s death in childbirth - a bad omen which would haunt her all her life. 

Hardly a year passes since the death and – like in a folktale - Adeline´s father 

remarries a proud and self-confident Eurasian woman just a few years older 

than Adeline. With new stepchildren coming, the family soon breaks into two 

strongly divided halves; one privileged, and the other one with Adeline and 

her four siblings constantly reminded of their inferior status. 

The hatred and jealousy of the new family members turn Adeline into a 

quiet but hard-working and studious Cinderella who though she cannot trust 

her closest family does everything to be worthy of her father´s pride. The 

educative function of Chinese Cinderella is to show that if you try hard, you 

can do anything. It also emphasises the meaning of parental love for a child. 

For Adeline, her father is the highest authority whose orders must be 

accepted. There is a scene in Chinese Cinderella which illustrates this fully. 

When Adeline´s father asks her about her future choice of career, she first 

answers that she would like to be a writer. Her father refuses, claiming it 

would not be not possible since her English language skills are not sufficient 

to achieve any success. Both books (international bestsellers) prove the 

authority wrong. Here, again, is a significant hidden culture clash: the 

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traditions of Chinese society, with its accent on unmistakable parental 

authority, opposed to the Western idea of individualism and fulfilling one´s 

dreams, which win in this case. Little Adeline excels at school, and to the 

great surprise of her father wins an international competition in writing. His 

daughter´s success persuades him to agree to studying medicine abroad – the 

only way she may escape the web of hatred and overwhelming jealousy. 

Chinese Cinderella finishes with a happy ending, as Adeline achieves the 

main goal of her childhood, when she proves that she is worthy of her 

father´s love, while Falling Leaves takes her story further, describing Adeline 

setting up her medical practice in California and finding - after a disastrous 

marriage - desired harmony in both private and work life. 

There are several fundamental differences - some more, some less 

obvious - between the two age-related books. The characters, setting and 

style of both books are comparatively alike, differing only in a few minor 

aspects. However, there are other issues such as the titles of both books 

hinting at the age group of their readers. Falling Leaves – Return to Their 

Roots implies a serious attempt to investigate family history, while Chinese 

Cinderella stresses the folktale-like character of a children´s narrative. 

Similarly, while Falling Leaves provides us with a rich socio-political account 

of Chinese history, Chinese Cinderella only gives its simplified version 

essential for a child to understand a distinct cultural and political context. 

Apart from the factual side of the stories, there is also the difference in 

Adeline´s life span covered in the books: the story for adults depicts her life 

far into the adulthood, while Chinese Cinderella stops when she gets the 

approval of her father to study medicine abroad. 

Yen Mah, with her Chinese Cinderella: The Secret Story of an Unwanted 

Daughter, belongs to one of the key streams in modern children´s literature 

which explores the intercultural world and wide spectrum of cultural 

encounter. Young protagonists in such stories are often outsiders, social and 

cultural outcasts, likely brought up - in a better case scenario – by a oneparent 

family, but usually struggling on their own. The work of Adeline Yen 

Mah belongs here in a specific way. On one hand, for any Western reader, 

Yen Mah´s stories are definitely set in a culturally distinct country; however, 

as it is pointed out later, they are rather based on similarity/universality 

between cultures than on differences. The stories do not imply Adeline´s 

exclusion because of her cultural background in childhood; she suffers as a 

family outcast, simply because of her unfortunate status of a half-orphaned 

115

kid. (Though, there are references to cultural marginalisation in the adult 

version – when Adeline moves to Britain and then to the US.) However, the 

stories stress another – and more general - dimension of intercultural 

discourse and encounter. It is not her personally who is in immediate danger, 

but the cultural heritage of her native country, as such: Chinese culture being 

threatened and mutilated by Western influence and dominance. A child in 

Yen Mah stories notices that Chinese culture and language are marginalised 

by the overwhelming influence of English, but experiencing cruelty within her 

family, she observes it more or less passively, as if from a distance. It is only 

after some years, as a writer who has learnt what is like to be ´the other´, 

Adeline points out that all elements of cultural heritage, including language 

and history, should be preserved regardless of one´s difficult life conditions. 

Interestingly enough, it is the children´s story which focuses on the 

importance of one´s cultural background, and identity, to a much larger 

extent than the book for adults. With her family background promoting an 

international ethos, little Adeline grew up only with very scarce contact with 

genuine Chinese culture. Her perspective is highly influenced by the school 

she attends: “My teacher Mother Marie says the only way to succeed in the 

second half of the twentieth century is to be fluent in English” (Yen Mah, p. 

170). She does not like learning Chinese and she often expresses her distaste 

for the language: “I’m sick and tired of blindly copying Chinese characters 

over and over into my notebook like a robot! I hate studying Chinese!” (…) “I 

only want to learn English, not Chinese” (ibid., p. 170). Ye Ye is the only 

person who reminds Adeline of the importance of values rooted in the 

history of their nation: “You may be right in believing that if you study hard, 

one day you might become fluent in English. But you will still look Chinese 

and when people meet you, they’ll see a Chinese girl no matter how well you 

speak English. You’ll always be expected to know Chinese and if you don’t, 

I’m afraid they will not respect you as much” (ibid., p. 171). Ye Ye also in 

other places explains that it is important to know the history of one´s country 

and suggests that to gain the respect of others, a person cannot be ashamed 

of his/her background. Here we find a universal message about one´s cultural 

heritage and identity: You should not (cannot) deny your cultural background 

because it is a natural part of your identity. In doing so, you would betray not 

only your roots, but also yourself. 

Adeline Yen Mah´s narratives contain several allusions – direct or indirect 

– to the Cinderella folktale, and the children´s version is a modern 

116

version/rewriting of the traditional tale which turns autobiographical stories 

(in their essence subjective and individual) into folktale narratives (in their 

essence true and universal). In the preface of her Chinese Cinderella, Adeline 

Yen Mah expresses the significance clearly: “every one of us has been shaped 

and moulded by the stories we have read and absorbed in the past. All 

stories, including fairy-tales, present elemental truths which can sometimes 

permeate your inner life and become part of you” (Yen Mah, p. ix). It is 

important to point out that the emphasis put on the universality of the story 

makes it attractive for any child, and thus stresses the idea that cultural 

awareness is nothing other than discovering universal and common ideas 

between distinct cultures. 

As it has been already shown in some other examples of texts, literature 

about cultural or racial difference often presents education as an important 

part of one’s social inclusion and similarly; in Yen Mah´s children´s story there 

is a much bigger emphasis put on the value of language, learning, education, 

and the already discussed cultural aspect, than in the version for an older 

reader. Children’s literature depicts the role of education through two basic 

aspects. The first may be the institution of school as the major story setting, 

and the place where crucial cultural encounters take place. At school children 

have to face them on their own, without parental help. School thus proves to 

be the place of the successful, or unsuccessful, inclusion of a child 

(Hevešiová, Kiššová, 2008). Other authors concentrate on the importance of 

education as the process of gaining knowledge important for life, in a cultural 

milieu where the dominant culture is different from their own. In other 

words, to be socially accepted by the people of the majority culture, one has 

to be educated and vice versa – as the process of education naturally involves 

also the people of the dominant culture being educated about the culture of 

the minority. In this sense, education is stressed as the means of achieving a 

better future for both cultures: for the minority it implies the key to social 

recognition and acceptance; for the majority – understanding of otherness 

and the realisation that both groups may profit from their coexistence. 

School is everything for Adeline. It is the place where social inclusion brings 

her happiness: “I was always happy when our rickshaw approached the 

imposing red brick building of St Joseph’s. I loved everything about my 

school: all the other little girls dressed in identical white starched uniforms 

just like mine; the French Franciscan nuns in black and white habits with big 

metal crosses dangling from their necks; learning numbers, the catechism 

117

and the alphabet; playing hopscotch and skipping at recess. My classmates 

made me feel like I belonged. Unlike my siblings, nobody looked down on 

me” (Yen Mah, 1999, p. 14). It is the place of predominantly positive 

connotations, in strong contrast with the family, as everything she lacks at 

home, Adeline gets at school. She experiences success and feels satisfaction 

when she is praised for her work: “I was winning the medal every week and 

wearing it constantly. I knew this displeased my siblings, especially Big Sister 

and Second Brother, but it was the only way to make Father take notice and 

be proud of me. Besides, my teachers and schoolmates seemed to be happy 

for me. I loved my school more and more” (ibid., p. 16). Adeline, as a modern 

Cinderella, wants to be respected, but there is no fair treatment and justice 

in the world where her stepmother governs. She feels that her future is 

rather dark, but again it is school and education in general which bring hope 

for a better tomorrow for her: “But, if I tried to be really good and studied 

very very hard, perhaps things would become different one day, I would think 

to myself. (…) I must just go to school every day and carry inside this dreadful 

loneliness, a secret I could never share” (ibid., p. 63). The emphasis put on 

the importance of education and cultural awareness in Chinese Cinderella is 

there on purpose, and we suppose that it is highly conditioned due to the age 

relatedness of the book. While Falling Leaves is a book for adults about an 

adult´s life, Chinese Cinderella is a story with a fundamental message for 

children. Ending the story with Adeline´s success of being allowed by the 

father to study abroad gives education the priority - and the key to a brighter 

future. 

Interestingly enough, the story for adults continues with the depiction of 

the family hatred and injustice felt by Adeline because of her siblings´ 

intrigues. As an adult reader, I enjoyed reading Chinese Cinderella much more 

than Falling Leaves, maybe for the way in which the two versions show what 

the writer considers important for a specific age group, and I was thus a bit 

ashamed that the gossipy tale was intended for the older readers. The 

children’s story put the emphasis on the importance of writing, language, 

knowing one´s historical and cultural background, and concepts such as 

family, home and education belonging to universal values. The story for 

adults aimed at depicting family hatred and small war-like conflicts among 

siblings and the desire for material well-being. It is always interesting for an 

adult reader to discover what thoughts adults want to pass down to other 

generations. In this way, Chinese Cinderella plays with the universality of the 

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folktale modified to coincide with specific trends in contemporary children´s 

literature. 

Conclusion 

Multicultural fiction is – without doubt – one of the most significant and 

dominant streams within contemporary literature for children and young 

adults, and also includes the cross-over literature phenomenon. The trend 

has been obviously shaped by demographic changes, accompanied with the 

desire to reflect and educate children in terms of cultural awareness, 

tolerance, the ideals of humanity and the politics of equality. Thus, the 

educative function and the discussion of cultural issues of such literature 

frequently dangerously outgrow its aesthetic function. Censorship has always 

been a very delicate and sensitive topic. Yes, we all are interested in what our 

children read, and we feel obliged to “protect” them against racist, 

misogynist and misanthropic attitudes; however, the whole issue sometimes 

goes too far. No one questions the need to be interested in the reading lists 

of the young, as books inevitably shape their worldview and make them 

aware of the various problems of the world around them. We agree that a 

child cannot grasp the complexities of cultural issues and needs an adult 

supervisor. But, the danger is that the process of controlling and actually 

censoring texts may lead to positive discrimination, and what is much worse 

– the deformation of reality and distortion of the truthful picture of the 

matter, when bad and unpleasant things are simply not presented. The 

approach that one must not offend anyone because this misdemeanour is 

automatically related to cultural background is simply not the way. So the 

question arises: What solution are we offering here? The answer is obvious. 

Critical thinking, the engagement of adults, discussions and particular 

attention paid to reception of multicultural literature. The role of adults 

(parents, teachers) is in this sense unquestionable; however, not that of 

controllers, but of active participants in the debate. 

In today´s global world, multicultural literature in English may also serve 

as a useful and very illustrative means for Slovak students and pupils. Of 

course, in the Slovak context we face slightly different cultural issues; 

however, the universal concepts of humanity, democracy and shared cultural 

benefits stay the same. That is actually why we strongly support the use of 

multicultural literature at all levels of education. Future teachers of English 

(at university level) should be aware that such literature exists, and they 

119

should know how to make use of it in their classes. For students and pupils at 

primary and secondary level of education multicultural literature serves as a 

tool for learning English, and at the same time, as a tool for inter- and transdisciplinary 

approaches, including the significant ethical dimension of the 

texts. 

The analyses of specific works for children – though still limited if one 

considers the vast number of multicultural books published - have shown 

that authors´ approaches differ, but they have also some things in common. 

From our perspective we observe that there are a few major trends – some 

of them closely examined in our study. First, authors often use 

autobiographical knowledge (also presented in the visual narratives discussed 

above), explain how they experienced cultural clashes and managed to 

handle the problems successfully. Second, they address an ‘international 

child’, and it is true that it is much easier today than ever before for children 

from all over the world to obtain and read literature written for children in 

other countries, and thus discover what problems they share, and which 

make them unique. Naturally, this dimension is very important in the global 

world, as children get a broader context of the world around them. Third 

(and most significant) is the fact that it is awareness – cultural, multicultural, 

and intercultural - which is generally sought as an essential attribute of an 

educated child of the twenty-first century. The work and mission of Beverly 

Naidoo focuses precisely on this fact: children should read about problems of 

children from other countries to become culturally and socially aware people, 

and to prevent any form of future cultural marginalisation and oppression. In 

this sense, multicultural fiction prepares children and young adults for life as 

we imagine it in the future, though sceptics may note essential utopian 

features of the West in the image: a democratic society with human rights, 

where marginalisation of any sort would be erased. 

Talking so much about the serious issues of life (and multicultural issues 

are serious), we should not forget that the fundamental attributes of 

childhood include joy and delight and - as a matter of fact - putting too much 

pressure on the young, we might easily and undesirably produce the 

miniature adults already observed in the past. Following that path, Western 

society would gradually change again; interestingly, some of the changes can 

already be seen (the process of strong individualisation, money acquisition, 

consumer culture and activity on internet social networks are just a few 

hints). We think that it is indeed an issue to give some thought, and hence 

120

let’s keep an open and vigilant eye on the writings for children and young 

adults. They tell us much about our desired future, but also reveal the reality 

we will eventually deserve. 

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126

LITERATURE AND CULTURE 

Anton Pokrivčák et al. 

Vydavateľ: 

UKF Nitra 

Posudzovatelia: Doc. PaedDr. Silvia Pokrivčáková, PhD. 

Doc. PhDr. Jaroslav Kušnír, PhD. 

Jazykový redaktor: Marcos Perez 

Technický redaktor: Anton Pokrivčák 

Náklad: 

80 ks 

Rozsah: 

127 strán 

Formát: 

A5 

Rok vydania: 2010 

Tlač: 

Vydavateľstvo Michala Vaška, Prešov 

ISBN 978-80-8094-790-3 

EAN 9788080947903 

127

Literature and Culture

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