1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910483669603321

Titolo

21st Century US Historical Fiction [[electronic resource] ] : Contemporary Responses to the Past / / edited by Ruth Maxey

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2020

ISBN

3-030-41897-9

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (278 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

813.0810906

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 20th century

Literature, Modern - 21st century

Literature

Contemporary Literature

North American Literature

Literature, general

America Literatures

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

'Working usefully against contemporary critical trends, Ruth Maxey's collection posits similarities between the historical novel and postmodern narratives. Each of the essays is enlightening; each persuades. A must-have collection.' - Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English & Comparative Literature, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA. 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.