Despite the devastation of combat in WWII, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, the fiction produced in America in the decade following resolutely avoided the events and their implications. Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature challenges popular notions regarding the ability of fantasy genres to force a confrontation with repressed horror by exploring the ways realist literature became a subversive site of reified taboo in America following World War II.

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary provides an extended analysis of Ellis's works to argue that his fiction, through the technique of underwriting, offers a new politics of literature. Dealing with his entire body of work to date, from Less Than Zero to Imperial Bedrooms, the study provides original readings of the writer's equivocal engagement with American culture. Reading Ellis's novels in relation to contemporary political, philosophical and aesthetic concerns, Colby recasts him as a social critic and a subversive...

Gun-toting, rough-riding, crack-shot women; train-robbing female bandits; blood-thirsty mothers who refuse to accept injustice- these women appear in vigilante literature as protagonists that recognize the extent of their own exploitation and directly confront the causes. In this dynamic study, Graham-Bertolini provides the first analysis of vigilante women in contemporary American fiction and develops a model of vigilante heroines using literary and feminist theory. Through close-readings of important texts, including those by Flagg, Glaspell, Hong-Kington, Hurston, Rawlings, Walker, this...

Writing Celebrity traces the rise of a national celebrity culture in the United States and examines the impact that this culture had on "literary" writing in the decades before World War II. Galow demonstrate the relevance of celebrity for literary scholarship by re-evaluating the careers of two major American authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.