Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction: Transnational and Multidirectional Memory

ISBN-13: 9783030524944 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 212 str.

Pei-chen Liao

Spis treści

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Introduction: Beyond and Before 9/11: A Transnational and Historical Turn

Chapter 2   “The Second Coming”: The Resurgence of the Historical Novel and American Alternate History

Chapter 3“America First”:Perpetual Fear, Memory, and Everyday Life in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America

Chapter 4   Neo-Internment Narratives:Post-9/11, Cross-racial, and Intergenerational Memories

Chapter 5“Walking a Tightrope”: Nostalgia, American Innocence, and Exceptionalism in Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin

Chapter 6   Worlding Alternate Histories of the Post-9/11 Era: The Transnational Trend, Normalization, and the Dynamics of Memory

Chapter 7   “Our Pearl Harbor Moment, Our 9/11 Moment”

O autorze

Pei-chen Liao is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and the winner of the 2017 FAOS Innovative Young Scholar Award. Her publications include‘Post’-9/11 South Asian Diasporic Fiction (2013) and articles in Life Writing, Review of English and American Literature, EurAmerica, and several other journals.

Blurb

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers’ reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans’ stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.