The Public Mind and the Politics of Postmillennial U.S.-American Writing / / ed. by Jolene Mathieson, Marius Henderson, Julia Lange.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2022 Part 1
• MitwirkendeR: Bieger, Laura,; Buschendorf, Christa,; Böger, Astrid,; Claviez, Thomas,; Franke, Astrid,; Gersdorf, Catrin,; Gross, Andrew S.,; Henderson, Marius,; Hopen, Kai,; Ickstadt, Heinz,; Kucharzewski, Jan D,; Lange, Julia,; Mathieson, Jolene,; Reichardt, Ulfried,; Schöpp, Joseph C.,; Sielke, Sabine,; Zapf, Hubert,
• HerausgeberIn: Henderson, Marius,; Lange, Julia,; Mathieson, Jolene,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series , 79
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (VIII, 285 p.)

In the last twenty years, how has U.S.-American writing and the reading public responded to the complexity of an American culture resolutely situated in a larger, highly politicized, globalized world undergoing radical change? The 20th-century modes of realism and postmodernism have been succeeded by writerly practices that are that are invested in the idea of embodied ‘authenticity’ and that are relatable to neorealism, whether it be via outright affirmation or critical experimentation and appropriation. The individual case studies mark the ways in which postmillennial U.S.-American writing is marked by an ongoing awareness toward complexity and the entanglement of writers and the reading public with pressing political concerns, and, at times oppressive, social and economic discursive and structural formations. These contributions further attest to how narrative and structural complexity, grammatical and lexical sophistication, and social nuance endure as the main literary modes of confronting 21st-century political life. This volume is thus of interest for both the study of U.S.-American political culture and U.S.-American literature.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Table of Contents -- The Public Mind and the Politics of Postmillennial U.S.-American Writing -- Section One: Novel Transitions in the Millennium -- The Late Style of Three Postmodernist Masters: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Robert Coover -- Siri Hustvedt and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature -- Shostakovich, Totalitarianism, and Anglo-American Fiction: Powers, Barnes, and Vollmann -- History is Suffering: Reading Teju Cole’s Open City in Light of Walter Benjamin and W. G. Sebald -- Greek Passion Revisited: Appropriations of Medea in African American Fiction -- Section Two: Realisms and Representing the Anthropocene -- The Newly Conventional U.S.-American Novel and the (Neo‐)Liberal Imagination: on Franzen, Eggers, and the Like -- Neorealism, Metonymy, and the Question of Contingency -- For the Birds: Nell Zink’s and Jonathan Franzen’s Environmentalist Fiction -- “…the Wood for the Trees”: Scale, Sentience, and Sentiment in Richard Powers’ The Overstory -- Forests, Sustainability, and the Ecological Cynicism of the Anthropocene: Reading Annie Proulx’s Barkskins -- Section Three: Identity and the Poetics of Transgression -- Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric: Fighting Microaggression, Loneliness, and Disconnection -- Ellen Hinsey: Poet of the Public Sphere -- “In Part, Absolutely”: Language, Form, and Potential in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School -- The 1619 Project as Aesthetic and Social Practice; or, the Art of the Essay in the Digital Age -- Notes on Contributors -- Index