After Postmodernism

The New American Fiction
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-0-367-64010-1
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 158 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 408 g

Several of American literature’s most prominent authors, and many of their most perceptive critics and reviewers, argue that fiction of the last quarter century has turned away from the tendencies of postmodernist writing. Yet, the nature of that turn, and the defining qualities of American fiction after postmodernism, remain less than clear.

This volume identifies four prominent trends of the contemporary scene: the recovery of the real, a rethinking of historical engagement, a preoccupation with materiality, and a turn to the planetary. Readings of works by various leading figures, including Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, A.M. Homes, Lance Olsen, Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace, support a variety of arguments about this recent revitalization of American literature.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Textual Practice.

Autoren/Hrsg.

K. Coffman, Christopher

Savvas, Theophilus

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Nachschlagewerke
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatur: Sammlungen, Anthologien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: American fiction after postmodernism

Theophilus Savvas and Christopher K. Coffman

1. Vegetarianism in the Anthropocene: Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen

Theophilus Savvas

2. The genrefication of contemporary American fiction

Alexander Moran

3. Feverish fictions: William T. Vollmann and American literary history after postmodernism

Christopher K. Coffman

4. Metaffective fiction: structuring feeling in post-postmodern American literature

Ralph Clare

5. Entropology and the end of nature in Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting

Alison Gibbons

6. Typical Eggers: transnationalism and America in Dave Eggers’s ‘globally-minded’ fiction

Bran Nicol

7. Making it long: men, women, and the great American novel now

Kasia Boddy

Über Autor(innen)

Christopher K. Coffman is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Boston University, MA, USA. He is the author of Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature (2019) and co-editor of William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion (2015).

Theophilus Savvas is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of American Postmodernist Fiction and the Past (2011).