In this remarkable book, Tony Hilfer provides a major survey of the wealth of post-war American fiction. He analyses the major modes and genres of writing, from realist to postmodernist metafiction and black humour, the fiction of social protest, women's writing, and the traditions of African-American, Southern and Jewish-American fiction. Key writers discussed include William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Vladimir Nabokov and Joyce Carol Oates. The book concludes by exploring contemporary trends through detailed case-studies of Donald Barthelme and Toni Morrison.

Schaub presents American fiction in the political climate of its time. Through the 1930s, he portrays authors as typically left of center and becoming disillusioned with communism as a result of Stalin's purges and his nonaggression pact with Hitler. Subsequent authors embraced a His general discussion comes to focus on the works of Barth, O'Connor, Ellison, and Mailer. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Brian Lee's study of American fiction from 1865 to 1940 draws on a wealth of material by, amongst others, Twain, James, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Though the works of these writers have been closely scrutinised by postwar critics in Europe and America, few attempts have yet been made to utilise the new critical approaches and theories in the service of literary history. Brian Lee does so in this book, relating the writers of the period - both major and minor - to its patterns of immense economic, social and intellectual change.

This series presents a comprehensive, global and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written ... by a international team of scholars ... -- dust jacket.

This book explores the major cultural forms of 1940s America - fiction and non-fiction; music and radio; film and theatre; serious and popular visual arts - and key texts, trends and figures, from Native Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob Hope. After discussing the dominant ideas that inform the 1940s the book culminates with a chapter on the 'culture of war'. Rather than splitting the decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the 1940s should be taken as a whole, seeking out links between wartime and postwar American culture.

An overview of US fiction since 1940 that explores the history of literary forms, the history of narrative forms, the history of the book, the history of media, and the history of higher education in the United States.

"A fine example of politically engaged literary criticism.--Belles Lettres "Price Herndl's compelling individual readings of works by major writers (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, Wharton, James, Fitzgerald) and minor ones complement her examination of germ theory, psychic and somatic cures, medicine's place in the rise of capitalism, and the cultural forms in which men and women used the trope of female illness.--Choice "A rich and provocative study of female illnesses and their textual representations. . . . A major contribution to the feminist agenda of literature and medicine.--Medical Humanities Review "[An] important book.--Nineteenth-Century Literature "[This] sophisticated new study . . . brings the best current strategies of a thoroughly historicized feminist literary criticism to bear on textual representations of female invalidism.--Feminist Studies "An outstanding study of the representation of female invalidism in American culture and literature. There emerges from this work a striking sense of the changing meanings of female invalidism even as the conjunction of these terms has remained a constant in American cultural history. . . . Moreover, Invalid Women provides fascinating readings of female illness in a variety of texts.--Gillian Brown, University of Utah "A provocative study based on imaginative historical research and very fine close readings. The book provides a useful American complement to Helena Michie's The Flesh Made Word and Margaret Homans's Bearing the World. It should prove enlightening and otherwise useful not just to scholars of American literature, but also to those engaged in American studies, feminist criticism and theory, women's studies, the sociology of medicine and illness, and the history of science and medicine.--Cynthia S. Jordan, Indiana University

This study posits that the narrative of sibling love as a culturally significant tradition in nineteenth-century American fiction. Ultimately, Emily E. VanDette suggests that these novels contribute to historical conversations about affiliation in such tumultuous contexts as sectional divisions, slavery debates, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.