21st Century US Historical Fiction

Ruth Maxey is Associate Professor in Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the author of South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010 (2012) and Understanding Bharati Mukherjee (2019) and co-editor of India at 70: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2019).

• 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.