Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism

Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature emerita, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. A former Guggenheim fellow, a senior NEH fellow, and a Rockefeller Institute fellow, she received the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature in 2012. Among her recent books are John Steinbeck: A Literary Life, Maya Angelou: Adventurous Spirit, and Hemingway’s Wars: The Public and Private Battles.

• Acknowledgments1 The Origins of the American Postmodern, Barth, Gass, Barthelme2 The Books that Shaped Directions, Coover, Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace3 Other Dominant Authors4 Postmodernism in Generations5 Later Generations—Morrison, Doctorow, Kingston and Chabon6 The Fusion of Genres in Twenty-First Century Literature7 "9/11" as Insistent Game-Changer8 Postmodern Writers in the Twenty-First CenturyBibliographyIndex

"The concept of postmodernism has been prominent in the scholarly discourse of the past five decades, a fact that might lead a reader to question the need for yet another introduction to it. Nevertheless, Linda Wagner-Martin's work is invaluable to that ongoing discussion because it largely transcends the thorny debate over postmodernism's conceptual and temporal boundaries. Instead, she summarizes a range of ways in which critics have defined postmodernism and traces the applicability of each one through several generations of American literary artists from the late 1950s until the late 2010s. Without ignoring the cultural polemics that surround the term, she succeeds in surveying postmodernism as a vital and multifaceted aesthetic." -- Derek C. Maus, SUNY Potsdam