Alexandra Lawrie – författare

This book explores a series of watershed moments in American politics through the lens of twenty-first-century fiction. Its contexts range from the Watergate scandal to the January 6 storming of the Capitol, from John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump. It considers authors such as Colson Whitehead, Ben Lerner, A. M. Homes, Dana Spiotta, Jack Livings, and Nathan Hill, with each chapter providing detailed close readings of new novels interwoven with the political contexts they evoke.

Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction examines contemporary novels profoundly shaped by a sense of historical consciousness. Authors including Ben Lerner, Colson Whitehead, Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru and Garth Greenwell each use flashbacks, historical parallels and non-sequential narrative arrangements to emphasise the re-emergence, in a twenty-first-century context, of historical structures and circumstances. This study explores how these frequent moments of temporal slippage amount to a 'falling out of time', as characters are forced to confront the past crises which continue to exert pressure on their own contemporary moment.