Contested Terrain

Keith Wilhite is associate professor of English at Siena College. He is editor of The City Since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television. Wilhite lives in Albany, New York.

“Keith Wilhite’s trenchant study of the literature of the U.S. suburbs is defined by a sophisticated critical understanding of regionality and regional writing. Vitally, Contested Terrain illuminates how post-1945 authors have interrogated the suburbs’ complex enmeshment within local, national, and global projects and processes.”—Martin Dines, author, The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spacial Complexity in Metropolitan America “Contested Terrain achieves the near impossible. It rescues a term pejoratively associated with provincialism to redefine suburbia as our primary noncontiguous national region. In making its case, by way of established and relatively new writers, ethnically diverse writers, and writers working in different genres, the book offers a superb cross section of what American writing over the last seventy-five years actually looks like.”—Stacey Olster, author, The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction