Hybridity in American Literature and Poetry

In this project we hope to develop a greater understanding of the role of hybridity in American literature over the last fifty years. We will investigate the manner in which hybridity is used by our chosen authors, the social implications that it holds, and the effects that its use creates for the reader. Our hypothesis is simply; that hybridity is used by each of our chosen writers to illustrate the racial and cultural diversity within the United States in the modern world. In a nation that is essentially a melting pot of world cultures, its minority peoples are often left feeling isolated and confused by their own identities and we believe that the following excerpts provide evidence of this.
Our chosen excerpts were written by the following authors: Bernard Malamud, Bharati Mukherjee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lorna De Cervantes and Ralph Ellison. These authors were all writing around the same time, from the middle to the end of the twentieth century and therefore, we will be abl...