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 Reading Mennonite Writing does.

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 identity to function in a post-identity age; and, finally, a tentative reinvestment in ideals of Mennonite community via the surprising routes of queerness and speculative fiction. In so doing, Zacharias reads Mennonite writing in North America as a useful case study in the shifting position of minor literatures in the wake of the transnational turn.

Theoretically sophisticated, this study of minor transnationalism will appeal to specialists in Mennonite literature and to scholars working in the broader field of transnational literary studies.

Smaro Kamboureli is a professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the English Department at the University of Toronto. She is the founder of the TransCanada series of books, published by WLU Press, originating from interdisciplinary conferences that initiated collaborative research on the methodologies and institutional structures and contexts that inform and shape the production, dissemination, teaching, and study of Canadian literature. Her most recent publications include Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (WLU Press 2012), co-edited with Robert Zacharias and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (WLU Press, 2013), co-edited with Kit Dobson.

Robert Zacharias' profile page

“It is a distinct privilege to read Zacharias’s opening of the bibliographic and encyclopedic vision of Mennonite/s writing, and a wonderful experience to follow his reader’s eye across time and texts to his conclusion that the small conversation on Mennonite literature has something to say to the larger world of literary criticism.”

—Maxwell Kennel Reading Religion

“This book establishes Zacharias’s position as the next generation’s leader in the field, even as it recognizes his predecessors.”

—Julia Spicher Kasdorf The Mennonite Quarterly Review

“Reading Mennonite Writing is an exciting, daring book that anyone interested in North American literary studies should read.”

—Daniel Shank Cruz Ancillary Review of Books

“Robert Zacharias demonstrates a truly impressive knowledge of the history of Mennonite publishing and reception. Extremely well read in a wide variety of Mennonite literary genres—what he terms a minor literature—he does valuable work in positioning this literature as fully engaged with transnational concerns and in attending to forgotten or neglected works within the field, while simultaneously positioning them alongside better- or well-known texts.”

—Grace Kehler, McMaster University