The Post-9/11 Great American Novel: Fictional Perpetuations of White American Trauma and Islamophobia

A study of the confluences between liberal white Americans' trauma, their reverting to hyper-conservative Islamophobia, and Don DeLillo's call to American authors that they compose a new so-called 'Great American Novel' pluriverse in the wake of 9/11.

In December 2001, Don DeLillo urged American writers to create “the counternarrative” that would reclaim control of culture in a call for nation-rebuilding fiction that mirrors John William de Forest's original post-Civil War coinage of the ter...