21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past

by Ruth Maxey

Overview

This new collection examines important US historical fiction published since 2000. Exploring historical novels by established American writers such as Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Susan Choi, and George Saunders, the book also includes chapters on first-time novelists. Individual essays in 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past tackle prominent and provocative new novels, for example, recent Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction by Anthony Doerr, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colson Whitehead. Interrogating such key themes as war, race, sexuality, trauma and childhood; notions of genre and periodization; and recent theorizations of historical fiction, scholars from the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland analyze an emerging canon of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse range of major American writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030418960
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/17/2020
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	275
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ruth Maxey is Associate Professor in Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the author of South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010 (2012) and Understanding Bharati Mukherjee (2019) and co-editor of India at 70: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2019).

Table of Contents

1. US Historical Fiction since 2000; Ruth Maxey.- 2. Folklore, Fakelore and the History of the Dream: James McBride’s Song Yet Sung; Judie Newman.- 3. To ‘Refract Time’: The Magical History of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad; Michael Docherty.- 4. Growing up Too Quickly: The Cultural Construction of Children in Lyndsay Faye’s Gods of Gotham Trilogy; James Peacock.- 5. ‘Everyone, we are dead!’: (Hi)story and Power in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo; Clare Hayes-Brady.- 6. ‘We cannot create’: The Limits of History in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed; Rachael McLennan.- 7. ‘Key Clacks and Bell Dings and Slamming Platens’: The Historical and Narrative Function of Music in E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley; Villy Karagouni.- 8. Archive Future: Trauma and the Child in Two Contemporary American Bestsellers; Aimee Pozorski.- 9. Creating a Usable Past: Writing the Korean War in Contemporary American Fiction; Ruth Maxey.- 10. Paternity, History, and Misrepresentation in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer; Debra Shostak.- 11. Queering the ‘Lost Year’: Transcription and the Lesbian Continuum in Susan Choi’s American Woman; Rebecca Martin.- 12. The Contemporary Sixties Novel: Post-postmodernism and Historiographic Metafiction; Mark West.- 13. ‘What’s the plot, man?’: Alternate History and the Sense of an Ending in David Means’ Hystopia; Diletta de Cristofaro.- 14. ‘To Avenging My People’: Speculating Revenge for US Slavery in Dwayne Alexander Smith’s Forty Acres; DeLisa D. Hawkes.