This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways.

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century's most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland's career, from "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" (1991) to "JPod" (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Designed for students, researchers and general readers alike, the study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland's engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and...

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century's most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland's career, from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) to JPod (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction.
Emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century - amidst the absurd contradictions of instantaneous global communication and acute poverty - Coupland's novels, short stories, essays and visual art have...

This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction. The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in...

Students and lecturers in contemporary American literature

This is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America's engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. Famously elusive, he is nevertheless central to any understanding of the story that the nation tells about itself and its relationship to the wider world. Pynchon's fiction is at once encyclopedic and devastatingly satirical, formally experimental and acutely political. It ranges across a wide span of historical moments - pre-revolutionary...