Full Description
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.
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.
