Writing Against the Grain: The Cross-over Genres of Maxine Hong Kingston's the Woman Warrior, China Men, And the Fifth Book of Peace/Geleneksel Formlarm Disinda Yazmak: Maxine Hong Kingston'in the Woman Warrior, China Men, Ve the Fifth Book of Peace Adli Eserlerinin Capraz Gecisli Turleri‪.‬

Abstract: This paper interrogates Kingston's use of multiple narrative discourses that, by fusing elements of fiction and non-fiction, transgress genre conventions in ways that no other contemporary American writer has accomplished. Reading Kingston's innovative books with the sole emphasis on the parameters "gender" and "ethnicity" runs the risk of essentializing her and her work. What I focus on in this paper is Kingston's composition of texts that challenge the status quo of genre normativity and that raise issues about how we read and classify literature in general. I argue that Kingston's intervention of cross-over genres, that is the conglomeration of fictional identity narratives, historicity and ethnography, and her attention to local (Chinese, American, Chinese American) and global political and social issues forces the readers to read against the grain of conventional forms of the novel, the memoir, and the autobiography. Keywords: genre theory, genre transgressions, canonicity, Asian American literature.