Dissenting Fictions: Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel

This study elucidates the relationship between identity formation and resistance to racial and sexual oppression in a group of contemporary American novels the author terms dissenting fictions, narratives that assert the subjectivity and historicity of marginalized peoples at precisely the moment when postmodern critiques proclaim the death of the subject and the inaccessibility of historical truth. Of primary concern is the question of how narrative fictions conceive of strategies of resis...