Critical introduction to the contemporary american novel focusing on contexts, key texts and criticism.

The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction explores fiction written over the last thirty years in the context of the profound political, historical, and cultural changes that have distinguished the contemporary period. Focusing on both established and emerging writers - and with chapters devoted to the American historical novel, regional realism, the American political novel, the end of the Cold War and globalization, 9/11, borderlands and border identities, race, and the legacy of postmodern aesthetics - this Introduction locates contemporary American fiction at the intersection of a specific time and long-standing traditions. In the process, it investigates the entire concept of what constitutes an “American” author while exploring the vexed, yet resilient, nature of what the concept of home has come to signify in so much writing today. This wide-ranging study will be invaluable to students, instructors, and general readers alike.

Factual Fictions: Narrative Truth and the Contemporary American Documentary Novel focuses on contemporary American documentary narratives, specifically the documentary novel, as it re-emerged in the 1960s and later developed into various other forms. The book explores the connections between the documentary novel and the concurrent rise of New Journalism (a.k.a. “literary journalism”) in the United States, situating the two genres in the cultural context of the tumultuous 1960s and an emerging postmodern ethos. Flis makes a comprehensive analysis of texts by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, John Berendt, and Don DeLillo, while tackling discussions on various theoretical complexities with assurance and rigor. Interested in the precarious divide between fact and fiction, the author productively complicates traditional notions of the two poles. Furthermore, the book examines parallels between contemporary Slovene documentary narratives and their American counterparts. Flis’s work, with its systematic and innovative approach to the subject matter, adds an important historical dimension to the developing field of literary journalism studies as well as to the more established area of 20th Century American literature.

This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

In this challenging book the author identifies the principle features of this new genre and interprets them as responses to modern society.

This book explores the concept of 'quiet' - an aesthetic of narrative driven by reflective principles - and argues for the term's application to the study of contemporary American fiction. In doing so, it makes two critical interventions. Firstly, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions, arguing that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, the Western tradition is filled with quiet characters. Secondly, it asks what it means for a novel to be quiet and how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy. Examining recent works by Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, among others, the book argues that quiet can be a multi-faceted state of existence, one that is communicative and expressive in as many ways as noise but filled with potential for radical discourse by its marginalisation as a mode of expression.

This book examines the post-1990s African American novels, namely the “neo-urban novel,” and develops a new urban discourse for the twenty-first century on how the city, as a social formation, impacts black characters through everyday discursive practices of whiteness. The critique of everyday life in a racial context is important in considering diverse forms of the lived reality of black everyday life in the novelistic representations of the white dominant urban order. African American fictional representations of the city have political significance in that the “neo-urban novel” explores the nature of the American society at large. This book explores the need to understand how whiteness works, what it forecloses, and what it occasionally opens up in everyday life in American society.

Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 provides valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of fictional genres produced in the United States from the late 18th century until the Civil War, and helps introductory students to interpret and understand the fiction from this popular period. Offers an overview of early fictional genres and introduces ways to interpret them today Features in depth examinations of specific novels Explores the social and historical contexts of the time to help the readers’ understanding of the stories Explores questions of identity - about the novel, its 19th-century readers, and the emerging structure of the United States - as an important backdrop to understanding American fiction Profiles the major authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, alongside less familiar writers such as Fanny Fern, Caroline Kirkland, George Lippard, Catharine Sedgwick, and E. D. E. N. Southworth Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title

Increasing specialization within the discipline of English and American Studies has shifted the focus of scholarly discussion toward theoretical reflection and cultural contexts. These developments have benefitted the discipline in more ways than one, but they have also resulted in a certain neglect of close reading. As a result, students and researchers interested in such material are forced to turn to scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s, much of which relies on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook aims to fill this gap by providing new readings of texts that figure prominently in the literature classroom and in scholarly debate − from James’s The Ambassadors to McCarthy’s The Road. These readings do not revert naively to a time “before theory.” Instead, they distil the insights of literary and cultural theory into concise introductions to the historical background, the themes, the formal strategies, and the reception of influential literary texts, and they do so in a jargon-free language accessible to readers on all levels of qualification.

Including: A response to critics, and: Ten rules for "serious" writers, the author continues his fight on behalf of the American reader, arguing against pretension in so-called "literary" fiction, naming names and exposing the literary status quo.