History of American Literature

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Bunting Institute, and other fellowships, as well as holding the Hubbell Medal for American Literature. She writes widely on twentieth-century American literature, biography, women's writing, and pedagogy. Her publications include "Favored Strangers": Gertrude Stein and Her Family (1995), The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States and its anthology(1995), Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (1999/2003), Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (2004), Emily Dickinson, A Literary Life (2013) Barbara Kingsolver's World: Nature, Art and the 21st Century (2014) and Toni Morrison and the Maternal, from the Bluest Eye to Home, 2014.

• Illustrations ixPreface xi1 Locating Contemporary Literature 1American Poetry During the 1950s 13A. Poems of the Mind and the Body 13B. The Farthest Edge: The Beats and the Confessional School 19American Theater During the 1950s 25American Fiction During the 1950s 28A. Fiction and the War 28B. Class and Sexuality in the Novel 32C. The Novel, Jewish and Southern 382 The Sixties and the Necessities of Change 47Theater of the 1960s 53African American Writing in the 1960s 581960s Fiction, Mainstream Markers 69Feminism 743 Conventions and Eruptions 79Poetry of the Anti-War and Feminist Years 81Feminist Fictions 90Postmodern Fictions 101Science Fiction and Alternative Worlds 112The New Journalism 123Theater During the 1970s 1294 New Ages and Old 139Memoir: Another New Direction 142Crime and Detective Fiction, American Style 150Theater During the 1980s 1685 The 1980s, Ethnicity and Change 175Asian American Writing 178Native American Writing 183Mexican American Writing (i.e., Latino/Latina) 189African American Writing 194Poetry in the 1980s 203Fiction in the 1980s 2146 The 1990s and the Sexual 225Sexual Preferences and Social/Legal Issues 227Theater of the 1990s 235The Poem at the Turn into the Twenty-First Century 242Story at the Turn into the Twenty-First Century 250Southern Literature at the Turn into the Twenty-First Century 2607 The Twenty-First Century 277The Story of 9/11 and Its Aftermath 286Theater 2000–2010 307Poetry 2000–2010 311Memoir and Life-Writing 2000–2010 319Fiction 2000–2010 326References 353Index 365