American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture brings together essays from international experts to examine one of the most vital and energized decades in American literature. This volume reads the rich body of 1990s American fiction in the context of key cultural concerns of the period.
The issues that the contributors identify as especially productive include:
- Immigration and America’s geographical borders, particularly those with Latin America
- Racial tensions, race relations and racial exchanges
- Historical memory and the recording of history
- Sex, scandal and the politicization of sexuality
- Postmodern technologies, terrorism and paranoia
American Fiction of the 1990s examines texts by established authors such as Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, who write some of their most ambitious work in the period, but also by emergent writers, such as Sherman Alexie, Chang-Rae Lee, E. Annie Proulx, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen. Offering new insight into both the literature and the culture of the period, as well as the interaction between the two in a way that furthers the New American Studies, this volume will be essential reading for students and lecturers of American literature and culture and late twentieth-century fiction.
Contributors include: Timothy Aubry, Alex Blazer, Kasia Boddy, Stephen J. Burn, Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, Suzanne W. Jones, Peter Knight, A. Robert Lee, Stacey Olster, Derek Parker Royal, Krishna Sen, Zoe Trodd, Andrew Warnes and Nahem Yousaf.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction - Jay Prosser. Transnational Borders. 2. Outside In: Latino/a Un-bordering in US Fiction - A. Robert Lee. 3. "Come change your destiny, turn suffering into silver and joy": Constituting Americans - Nahem Yousaf. 4. America as Diaphor: Cultural Translation in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World - Krishna Sen. Race Cathexes. 5. Red, White and Black: Racial Exchanges in Fiction by Sherman Alexie - Andrew Dix. 6. In the Shadow of the Gun: African-American Fiction and the Anxieties of Nostalgia - Andrew Warnes. 7. Tragic No More?: The Reappearance of the Racially Mixed Character - Suzanne W. Jones. Historical Narratives. 8. The Way We Were(n’t): Origins and Empire in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon - Stacey Olster. 9. Contesting the Historical Pastoral in Philip Roth's American Trilogy - Derek Parker Royal. 10. Skating on a shit field: Tim O’Brien and the topography of trauma - Brian Jarvis. Sex Images. 11. A Painful Progress: Queer Fiction and the American Protest Literature Tradition - Zoe Trodd. 12. Regular Lolitas: The Afterlives of an American Adolescent - Kasia Boddy. 13. Glamorama, Fight Club, and the Terror of Narcissistic Abjection - Alex Blazer. Postmodern Technologies. 14. Beyond the Cold War in Don DeLillo’s Mao II and Underworld - Peter Knight. 15. Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest - Timothy Aubry. 16. The End of Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium - Stephen J. Burn.
