This selection of fiction by many of America's best writers, each coupled with a distinguished critic's response, is designed to defy the chronological secondariness of critical interpretation.

John Barth represents most completely what has been termed postmodernism, not because his work comprises more postmodernist features than other contemporary writers but because, for Barth, life and art are two sides of the same coin. In this brief study, first published in 1987, Heide Ziegler examines all Barth's novels. She argues that each pair of novels first exhausts and then replenishes those literary genres that hinge on a particular world view: the existentialist novel, the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, or the realistic novel. Through the division of labour between character and...