Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel

Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Research Associate Professor for Literary Theory, Literary Studies and Literary Studies Education at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. His previous publications include the monographs Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature (UP Mississippi, 2018) and The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic (Schöningh, 2013), which won the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize in 2015. Most recently, he has been the editor of the Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (Routledge 2021) and co-editor of The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities (with Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and of Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Speculative Historism, Visible Historical FuturesAt the Edges of Realism: Ken Kalfus’s EquilateralThe Prismatic Lens of Genre: Joyce Carol Oates’s The AccursedA Less Oblique Mode of Political Art: Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! and Jason Heller’s Taft 2012Escapism, Nostalgia, and Hope: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player OneMarvellous Histories, Possible Futures: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoSlavery and Speculation: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ben Winter’s Underground AirlinesConclusion: Speculative Historism and Contemporary Hope BibliographyIndex

Lanzendörfer gives a fascinating and persuasive account of what he calls "speculative historicism," a literary mode that deploys the logic of speculative genres to figure history in surprising new ways. He undertakes many excellent and provocative readings of important novels, providing scholars of our contemporary crisis much to ponder and debate.