The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945

Description

Each generation revises literary history and this is nowhere more evident than in the post-Second World War period. This 2011 Companion offers a comprehensive, authoritative and accessible overview of the diversity of American fiction since the Second World War. Essays by nineteen distinguished scholars provide critical insights into the significant genres, historical contexts, cultural diversity and major authors during a period of enormous American global political and cultural power. This power is overshadowed, nevertheless, by national anxieties growing out of events ranging from the Civil Rights Movement to the rise of feminism; from the Cold War and its fear of Communism and nuclear warfare to the Age of Terror and its different yet related fears of the 'Other'. American fiction since 1945 has faithfully chronicled these anxieties. An essential reference guide, this Companion provides a chronology of the period, as well as guides to further reading.

John N. Duvall is the Margaret Church Distinguished Professor of English at Purdue University. He has published nine previous books on modernist and contemporary American fiction, most recently Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008) and Faulkner and his Critics (2010).

'This selection of essays maintains the high standard of content and presentation of other companions in this series. It provides an up-to-date survey of the field in an approachable and manageably-sized volume, and as such would be an important addition [to] university libraries serving American studies, literature or similar departments, as well as public libraries.' Linda Kemp, Reference Reviews