The dissident voice in US culture might almost be said to have been born with the territory. Its span runs from Roger Williams to Thoreau, Anne Bradstreet to Gertrude Stein, Ambrose Bierce to the New Journalism, The Beats to the recent Bad Subjects cyber-crowd. This new study analyses three recent literary tranches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar "outrider" voices - Hunter Thompson to Frank Chin, Joan Didion to Kathy Acker; and a latest purview of what, all too casually, has been designated "ethnic" writing. The aim is to set up and explore these different counter-seams of modern American writing, those which sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons.

A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, is professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, The University of Virginia, The University of Colorado and Berkeley. His recent books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Postindian Conversations, with Gerald Vizenor (1999); Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the 2004 American Book Award; Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), and Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2008). He has also been responsible for a large number of essay-collections, among them Other British, Other Britain: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction (1995), The Beat Generation Writers (1996), the 4-volume Herman Melville: Critical Assessments (2001), China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (2008) and Native American Writing, 4 Vols. (forthcoming 2009).

Acknowledgments Introduction: Counter Writing Part I: Beats 1: Beat Canon, Beat Shadow Canon 2: Beat Speaking Women: Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Anne Waldman 3: Black Beat: Performing Ted Joans 4: Beat International: Michael Horovitz, Andrei Voznesensky, Kazuko Shiraishi Part II: Outriders 5: Gonzo Scripts: Hunter S. Thompson 6: A View of One's Own: Joan Didion 7: Pirated Texts: Kathy Acker Part III: Ethnics 8: Ethnics Behaving Badly: Texts and Contexts 9: Home and Away: US Poetries of Immigration and Migrancy 10: Out of the 1990s: Latino/a Un-bordering in US Fiction 11: A Western East: America's China Poetry in Marilyn Chin, Russell Leong, John Yau and Wing Tek Lum 12: Insider, Outsider: Japanese America Writing Japan 13: Bad Boy, Godfather, Storyteller: Frank Chin 14: Manila Tropics: Jessica Hagedorn 15: Black South, Black Europe: William Demby 16: Rearview Mirrors: Gerald Vizenor Notes Index