Reading Mennonite Writing

<p>Mennonite literature has long been viewed as an expression of community identity. However, scholars in Mennonite literary studies have urged a reconsideration of the field''s past and a reconceptualization of its future. This is exactly what <em>Reading Mennonite Writing</em> does.</p><p>Drawing on the transnational turn in literary studies, Robert Zacharias positions Mennonite literature in North America as "a mode of circulation and reading" rather than an expression of a distinct community. He tests this reframing with a series of methodological experiments that open new avenues of critical engagement with the field''s unique configuration of faith-based intercultural difference. These include cross-sectional readings in nonnarrative literary history; archival readings of transatlantic life writing; Canadian rewritings of Mexican film''s deployment of Mennonite theology as fantasy; an examination of the fetishistic structure of ethnicity as a "thing" that has enabled Mennonite id