Contemporary American and Canadian Writers – serie

Paul Auster provides the first extended analysis of Auster’s essays, poetry, fiction, films and collaborative projects. It explores his key themes of identity; language and writing; metropolitan living and community; and storytelling and illusion. By tracing how Auster's representations of New York and city life have matured from a position of urban nihilism to qualified optimism, the book shows how the variety of forms he works in influences the treatment of his central concerns. The chapters are organised around gradually extending spaces to reflect the way in which Auster’s work broadens its focus, beginning with the poet’s room and finishing with the global metropolis of New York: his home city and often his muse. The book uses Auster’s published and unpublished literary essays to explain the shifts from the dense and introspective poems of the 70s, through the metropolitan fictions of the 80s and early 90s, to the relatively optimistic and critically acclaimed films, and his return to fiction in recentyears.

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading the author alongside a number of his contemporaries, and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways. At the heart of this book are a number of detailed and nuanced readings of Roth’s works both in terms of their relationships with each other and with fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O’Brien, Brett Easton Ellis, Stanley Elkin, Howard Jacobson and Jonathan Safran Foer. Brauner identifies as a thread running through all of Roth’s work the use of paradox, both as a rhetorical device and as an organising intellectual and ideological principle.

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading the author alongside a number of his contemporaries, and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways. At the heart of this book are a number of detailed and nuanced readings of Roth’s works both in terms of their relationships with each other and with fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O’Brien, Brett Easton Ellis, Stanley Elkin, Howard Jacobson and Jonathan Safran Foer. Brauner identifies as a thread running through all of Roth’s work the use of paradox, both as a rhetorical device and as an organising intellectual and ideological principle.

Louise Erdrich is one of the most critically and commercially successful Native American writers. This book is the first fully comprehensive treatment of Erdrich’s writing, analysing the textual complexities and diverse contexts of her work to date. Drawing on the critical archive relating to Erdrich’s work and Native American literature, Stirrup explores the full depth and range of her authorship. Breaking Erdrich’s oeuvre into several groupings - poetry, early and late fiction, memoir and children’s writing - Stirrup develops individual readings of both the critical arguments and the texts themselves. He argues that Erdrich’s work has developed an increasing political acuity to the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Native American literatures. Erdrich’s insistence on being read as an American writer is shown to be in constant and mutually-inflecting dialogue with her Ojibwe heritage.This sophisticated analysis is of use to students and readers at all levels of engagement with Erdrich’s writing.

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century’s most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland’s career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century - amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty - Coupland’s novels, short stories, essays and visual art have intervened in specifically contemporary debates regarding authenticity, artifice and art. This book explores Coupland’s response, in ground-breaking novels such as Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, to some of the most pressing issues of our times. Designed for students, researchers and general readers alike, the study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland’s engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and ideas of the future.

This is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America’s engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. In chapters that address the full range of Pynchon’s career, from his earliest short stories and first novel, V., to his most recent work, this book offers highly accessible and detailed readings of a writer whose work is indispensable to understanding how the American novel has met the challenges of postmodernity. The authors discuss Pynchon’s relationship to literary history, his engagement with discourses of science and utopianism, his interrogation of imperialism and his preoccupation with the paranoid sensibility. Invaluable to Pynchon scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study explores how Pynchon’s complex narratives work both as exuberant examples of formal experimentation and as serious interventions in the political health of the nation.

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century’s most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland’s career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century - amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty - Coupland’s novels, short stories, essays and visual art have intervened in specifically contemporary debates regarding authenticity, artifice and art. This book explores Coupland’s response, in ground-breaking novels such as Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma and Miss Wyoming, to some of the most pressing issues of our times. Designed for students, researchers and general readers alike, the study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland’s engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and ideas of the future.

This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction. The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of “black” subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship.Aimed at students and researchers, it promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between passing, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction.

Jonathan Lethem is the first full-length study dedicated to the work of an exciting, genre-busting contemporary writer with an increasingly high profile in American literature. Examining all of Lethem’s novels, as well as a number of his short fictions, essays and critical works, this study shows how the author’s prolific output, his restlessness and his desire always to be subverting literary forms and genres, are consistent with his interest in subcultural identities. The human need to break off into small groupings, subcultures or miniature utopias is mirrored in the critical tendency to enforce generic boundaries. To break down the boundaries between genres, then, is partly to make a nonsense of critical distinctions between 'high' and 'low' literature, and partly to reflect the wider need to recognise difference, to appreciate that other people, no matter how outlandish and alien they may appear, share similar desires, experiences and problems. With this in mind, James Peacock argues that Lethem’s experiments with genre are not merely games or elaborate literary jokes, but ethical necessities, particularly when viewed in the light of the losses and traumas that shadow all of his writing. Jonathan Lethem, therefore, makes an important contribution not just to Lethem studies, but also to debates about genre and its position in postmodern or 'post-postmodern' literature. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of contemporary American writing, as well as those interested in genre fiction and literature’s relationship with subcultures.

Making home explores the figure of the orphan child in a broad selection of contemporary US novels by popular and critically acclaimed authors Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez and Toni Morrison. The orphan child is a continuous presence in US literature, not only in children’s books and nineteenth-century texts, but also in a variety of genres of contemporary fiction for adults. Making home examines the meanings of this figure in the contexts of American literary history, social history and ideologies of family, race and nation. It argues that contemporary orphan characters function as links to literary history and national mythologies, even as they may also serve to critique the limits of literary history, as well as the limits of familial and national belonging.

Sara Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. Paretsky’s work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts – whether they be personal, institutional, or national – that authorise ‘forgetting’ of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky’s achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction.

Now available in paperback, this is the first book-length study of Mark Z. Danielewski, an American novelist who is rapidly establishing himself as a leading figure in the landscape of contemporary literature. It places his three major works to date, House of Leaves, The Fifty Year Sword and Only Revolutions, in their literary-historical context, and considers them alongside the media platforms which they have inspired, including internet forums and popular music. Leading critics examine Danielewski’s pioneering novels, generating new insights into their innovative interplay of word and image. A variety of critical perspectives are adopted, from the close analysis of the poetic form of Only Revolutions to the consideration of the effects of his work on the reader. Danielewski’s use of epic tropes is explored, as too is the relationship of his work to that of his most influential predecessors (including James Joyce) and his most relevant contemporaries (including David Foster Wallace). His radical reappraisal of the dynamic possibilities that the printed book has to offer in this digital age is a common theme. The book will be of significant interest to all scholars working on Danielewski, as well as to students of the American novel, contemporary literature, and twenty-first century media culture. It will also appeal to Danielewski’s many fans, and all those, who like the contributors to this volume, have been inspired by his work.

Now available in paperback, this is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America’s engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. In chapters that address the full range of Pynchon’s career, from his earliest short stories and first novel, V., to his most recent work, this book offers highly accessible and detailed readings of a writer whose work is indispensable to understanding how the American novel has met the challenges of postmodernity. The authors discuss Pynchon’s relationship to literary history, his engagement with discourses of science and utopianism, his interrogation of imperialism and his preoccupation with the paranoid sensibility. Invaluable to Pynchon scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study explores how Pynchon’s complex narratives work both as exuberant examples of formal experimentation and as serious interventions in the political health of the nation.

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.

Best known for a trilogy of historical novels set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, Marilynne Robinson is a prolific writer, teacher, and public speaker, who has won the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama. This collection intervenes in Robinson’s growing critical reputation, pointing to new and exciting links between the author, the historical settings of her novels, and the contemporary themes of her fictional, educational, and theoretical work. Introduced by a critical discussion from Professors Bridget Bennett, Sarah Churchwell, and Richard King, Marilynne Robinson features analysis from a range of international academics, and explores debates in race, gender, environment, critical theory, and more, to suggest new and innovative readings of her work.

Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy’s literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant.

This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction. The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of “black” subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship.The title promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between passing, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction.

Sara Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. Paretsky’s work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts – whether they be personal, institutional, or national – that authorise ‘forgetting’ of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky’s achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction.

Making home explores the figure of the orphan child in a broad selection of contemporary US novels by popular and critically acclaimed authors Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, Jonathan Safran Foer, John Irving, Kaye Gibbons, Octavia Butler, Jewelle Gomez and Toni Morrison. The orphan child is a continuous presence in US literature, not only in children’s books and nineteenth-century texts, but also in a variety of genres of contemporary fiction for adults. Making home examines the meanings of this figure in the contexts of American literary history, social history and ideologies of family, race and nation. It argues that contemporary orphan characters function as links to literary history and national mythologies, even as they may also serve to critique the limits of literary history, as well as the limits of familial and national belonging.

How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors – including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole – this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.

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.

Can reading make us better citizens? In Crossing borders and queering citizenship, Feghali crafts a sophisticated theoretical framework to theorise how the act of reading can contribute to the queering of contemporary citizenship in North America. Providing sensitive and convincing readings of work by both popular and niche authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, this book is the first to not only read these authors together, but also to discuss how each powerfully resists the exclusionary work of state-sanctioned citizenship in the U.S. and Canada. This book convincingly draws connections between queer theory, citizenship studies, and border studies and sheds light on how these connections can reframe our understanding of American Studies.

How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors – including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole – this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.

Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy’s literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shapes our value systems. In a world recovering from global economic crisis and poised on the brink of another, studying the methods by which literature interrogates narratives of inevitability around global economic inequality and eco-disaster is ever more relevant.