Writing the Past in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction

Alexandra Lawrie is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

• Acknowledgements Introduction Historical racism and contemporary incarceration in C. E. Morgan and Hari Kunzru Ben Lerner and literary antecedents of the city Dana Spiotta and political commitment AIDS activism and looking back in Tim Murphy and Garth Greenwell Anxious futures in Colson Whitehead and Omar El Akkad Conclusion Bibliography

'Always historicize!’ Fredric Jameson taught us, and Alexandra Lawrie does so compellingly in her account of a turn-of-the-millennium generation of US novelists who have themselves taken Jameson’s lesson to heart. Sampling half a dozen or so representative writers, some of them　 familiar, others less so, Lawrie illuminates the contemporary art of fiction by adeptly interweaving attentive close reading with contextualizing historical information.