White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature

Tim Engles is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, USA, specializing in multicultural literature and critical whiteness studies. He has co-edited Critical Essays on Don DeLillo (2000) and Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise (2006) and his recent publications address the work of Gloria Naylor, Tim O’Brien and Walter Dean Myers, as well as systemic racism in the criminal justice system and racialized social media slacktivism.

• 1. Introduction: Making America White Male Again.- 2. Ethnicized White Male Nostalgia: Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.- 3. Moralizing White Male Nostalgia: Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday.- 4. Spatialized White Male Nostalgia: Carol Shields’s Happenstance.- 5. Denying White Male Nostalgia: Don DeLillo’s Underworld.- 6. Possessive White Male Nostalgia: Louis Begley’s About Schmidt.- 7. Epilogue: Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and the Futures of Domineering