Werner Sollors's work has helped to redefine the field of American ethnic and multicultural studies. His books and articles have contributed to a revision of how the categories of ethnicity and race enter into the making of literature as well as the process of canon formation. Sollors has challenged assumptions underlying existing scholarship on ethnic literary history. As the result of the New Ethnicity movement of the 1970s, ethnic literary studies were characterized by a group-by-group approach that emphasized the isolation of ethnic authors from mainstream literature. Sollors criticized this approach as being flawed by "biological insiderism" and claimed that it ignored artistic movements that cross ethnic lines. Stressing that ethnic literature is "prototypically American literature," his goal has been to develop a new terminology that goes "beyond the organicist imagery of roots and can come to terms with the pervasiveness and inventiveness of syncretism."

Sollors's impatience with...