How do transnational Asian American novels and poems reimagine the classics of nineteenth-century American literature? The Asian American Renaissance: Literary Encounters Across Time is the first scholarly investigation into the formal and archival links between canonical authors such as Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville and their twentieth-century Asian American counterparts. It investigates how a transnational group of authors--Carlos Bulosan, Younghill Kang, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Eileen Chang--inherit the American Renaissance as both a racial allegory and a supplier of literary forms such as the romance and the jeremiad.