The Contemporary American Novel in Context

The Contemporary American Novel in Context
Author: Andrew Dix
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2011-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441132058

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

The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction

The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction
Author: Stacey Olster
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-06-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108394094

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.

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]
Author: Linda De Roche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 2067
Release: 2021-06-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

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.

Blank Fictions

Blank Fictions
Author: James Annesley
Publisher: Pluto Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1998
Genre: American fiction
ISBN: 9780745310909

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

The Quiet Contemporary American Novel

The Quiet Contemporary American Novel
Author: Rachel Sykes
Publisher: Contemporary American and Cana
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781526163615

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.

Reading the American Novel 1780 - 1865

Reading the American Novel 1780 - 1865
Author: Shirley Samuels
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2013-06-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118786319

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

Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Author: Timo Müller
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2017-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110422425

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.

Violence in the Contemporary American Novel

Violence in the Contemporary American Novel
Author: James Richard Giles
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2000
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781570033285

Framing his study with two cases of violence involving children in Chicago, he notes the degree to which violence in the novels is perpetrated by adults against children or, even more shockingly, by children against children.".

A Reader's Manifesto

A Reader's Manifesto
Author: B. R. Myers
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

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.

The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions

The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions
Author: Colleen G. Eils
Publisher:
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2020-09-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780814214220

The Politics of Privacy in Contemporary Native, Latinx, and Asian American Metafictions is the first book-length study to approach contemporary issues of racialized visibility and privacy through narrative form. Using a formal maneuver, narrative privacy, Colleen G. Eils analyzes how writers of contemporary metafictions explicitly withhold stories from readers to illuminate and theorize the politics of privacy in a post-9/11 US context. As a formal device and reading strategy, narrative privacy has two primary critical interests: affirming the historically political nature of visibility, particularly for people of color and indigenous people, and theorizing privacy as a political assertion of power over representation and material vulnerability. Eils breaks strict disciplinary silos by putting visibility/surveillance studies, ethnic studies, and narrative studies in conversation with one another. Eils also puts texts in the Native, Latinx, and Asian American literary canon in conversation with each other. She focuses on texts by Viet Thanh Nguyen, David Treuer, Monique Truong, Rigoberto González, Nam Le, and Stephen Graham Jones that call into question our positions as readers and critics. In deliberately and self-consciously evading readers through the form of their fiction, these writers seize privacy as a political tool for claiming and wielding power in both representational and material registers.