Edinburgh as a Machine: Reclamation, Resistance, and the Formative Fiction

Abstract

This essay first identifies Edinburgh by Alexander Chee as a formative fiction, as defined by Stanford professor Joshua Landy. It then explores the stakes of creating a formative fiction in the literary age of suspicion in which we exist, as well as within the context of the multiplistic expectations that readers place upon Asian American writers. This essay ultimately positions Edinburgh as a reclamation of the novel for Alexander Chee, who faced unique expectations with the externally attached title of the “first gay Korean American novelist.”