The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postmodern Realist Fiction: Resisting Master Narratives

Description

Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid, comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with special attention to 21st-century novels. Writers covered include: Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S. Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette Winterson, among others.

T.V. Reed is Buchanan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Washington State University, USA. His recent books include The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present (2019) and Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era (2019). Reed also curates the web matrix culturalpolitics.net.

T.V. Reed is a formidable champion, both theoretically and in the realm of textual or cultural analyses, for the centrality of the referential function of aesthetic postmodernism. His Bloombury Introduction to Postmodern Realist Fiction exemplifies such critical efforts through its masterful and compelling presentation of this unique but less often elucidated or theorized dimension of the postmodern interventionary politics. By the example of his surveys and discussions, Reed shows convincingly why postmodern realist fiction-a mode of aesthetic experimentalism emerging out of the mid-1960s-is a representational instrument ideally suited for engaging the vital concerns of America's late capitalist culture, as well as for legitimizing subaltern struggles, voices, and aspirations. * Jinqi Ling, Professor of English, UCLA, USA *