Abstract

Close readings of the ancillary prose of many contemporary American literature anthologies---prefaces, forewords, introductions, headnotes, afterwords, and the like---demonstrate that these anthologies work to position their selections and their narratives as a whole at the intersection of the values of universality and diversity. ;"How Anthologies Work" begins with a comparison of the contributors to ten literature anthologies . This analysis presents a tabulation of contributors included in each anthology, sorted by gender and ethnicity. The count of contributors reveals a slight overrepresentation in nine of the ten anthologies of Asian American women writers compared to that of Asian American men writers, in proportion to all women writers as compared to all men writers. ;The method in the remainder of the analysis is to trouble the perception that the comparative overrepresentation of Asian American women writers is the result of a simple "correction" of past underrepresentation. This overrepresentation, rather, works in unison with the supporting prose of these anthologies to privilege their selections as syntheses of universality and diversity in terms of frontier mythology. American literature anthologies utilize the universal/diversity dialectic, expressed in terms of the frontier myth, to continue the tradition of presenting a narrative of an American literature which is unique, because America is unique, even as that tradition is now re-worked to incorporate traditionally underrepresented voices without rejecting established criteria of "universality" as a measure of quality