even fashionable. Sociological studies such as Michael Novak The Rise of the
Unmeltable Ethnics ( 1972) and Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan Beyond the
Melting Pot ( 1970) pointed out the "myth of the melting pot," that, in fact, the stew
of America had not assimilated differences between groups, and that ethnicity
persisted. Novak called for a celebration of diversity: "by each of us becoming
more profoundly what we are, we will find greater unity in those depths in which
unity irradiates diversity . . ." ( 71 ). Glazer and Moynihan stated that "the ethnic
pattern was American, more American than the assimilationist," and the ethnic
pattern offers hope of a diverse but common society. ( xxii - xxiv ).

Just as sociologists began to study and celebrate ethnic differences in the 1970s,
literary critics began to take an interest in ethnic literature, including the literature
of immigration. As more young writers, including those of the "new" immigrant
groups, began writing of their experiences and those of their predecessors, critics
began studying their work. For example, the 1970s saw the publication of Maxine Hong Kingston's
The Woman Warrior ( 1976), and Rudolfo Anaya Bless Me,
Ultima ( 1972), as well as the founding of MELUS, the Journal of the Society for
the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States ( 1973). On college campuses,
anthologies of ethnic writers began to appear as well as a few representations in
"mainstream" textbooks such as the Norton Anthology.

Equally concerned with prejudice, especially that faced by ethnic, nonwhite
writers, literary criticism of the new ethnic fiction often expressed anger at how
these writers had been excluded from the canon. Perhaps the most well-known
example is Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers edited by Jeffrey Paul Chan
, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong ( 1974). The
editors criticize the lack of attention to Asian American literature by reviewers and
scholars, and also fault some of the literature of the past and present for being
inauthentic and ingratiating to the dominant white culture.

In the 1980s, new studies of ethnicity by Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity and
The Invention of Ethnicity ( 1986; 1989), took a seemingly radical new direction by
suggesting that rather than being an "essentialist" condition acquired by biologi-
cal and cultural "descent" from one's foreparents, ethnicity is an invented condi-
tion, one of "consent," discovered by various groups after they immigrated to the
United States. In this viewpoint, ethnicity is part of fiction making whereby a
group continually reinvents itself as it negotiates and renegotiates its identity vis à
vis the larger society. In an example given by many sociologists, Italians of the late
nineteenth century (the various provinces of the Italian peninsula were united into
a nation only in the 1860s) had little sense of being Italian but rather thought of
themselves as Sicilians or Calabrians ( Hechterxiv-xv; Portes and Rumbaut 104).
When they discovered that others thought of them as "Italian" and often were
prejudiced against them, they began to acquire an ethnic identity.

According to Sollors, the formation of an ethnic identity, which began in eigh-
teenth-and nineteenth-century Europe of growing, competing nation-states, involves
the creation of national or ethnic symbols as obvious as a St. Patrick's Day parade
or a Chinese New Year's Day parade, or as complex as a group's literature and

-xiv-