Amnesia and Redress in Contemporary American Fiction

MARNI GAUTHIER Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York College at Cortland, USA.

• Contemporary Historical Fiction and a Politics of Truth 'The Downfall of the Empire and the Emergence of Detergents': Underhistory in Don DeLillo's Historical Novels The Other Side of Paradise:  Toni Morrison's (Un)Making of Mythic History A Politics of Truth and the Transnational Comm(unity) of Abolitionists: Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise   Transnational Empire and its Exuberant (dis)Contents: Bharati Mukherjee's Holder of the World   Truth-Telling Fiction in a Post-9/11 World:  Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine   Looking Back is Looking Forward: The Torture Debate and the Cultural Work of Truth-Telling Historical Fiction in the 21st Century

"An original and valuable contribution to our thinking about history and narrative and the important current debate about the survival and continuing viability of a postmodern aesthetic. Truth is no longer, we feel, something for jesting Pilate to wash his hands of. Nor can it be allowed to disappear into the rarefied vacuum of poststructuralist ideas about language and referentiality. Gauthier's analyses repeatedly open the eyes of her readers to features not noticed before, to fresh interpretive angles, and to the cultural work of these contemporary historical novels - their truth telling, their revising nationalist histories and mythologies, their (re)making national mythic history, their speaking truth to power. " - David Cowart, Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities, University of South Carolina "At once erudite and passionate, Gauthier s book meticulously carves out a space for an emergent genre of historical fiction that, unlike historiographic metafiction, articulates a politics of truth telling. Mixing primary-source research with attentive close readings, she persuasively demonstrates how a wide range of contemporary authors aim to recover and redress forgetfulness about an array of historical traumas. In so doing, she offers a powerful new paradigm for transamerican studies." - Mark Osteen, professor of English, Loyola University Maryland and author of American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture