David Foster Wallace is invariably seen as an emphatically American figure. Lucas Thompson challenges this consensus, arguing that Wallace's investments in various international literary traditions are central to both his artistic practice and his critique of US culture. Thompson shows how, time and again, Wallace's fiction draws on a diverse range of global texts, appropriating various forms of world literature in the attempt to craft fiction that critiques US culture from oblique and unexpected vantage points.

Using a wide range of comparative case studies, and drawing on...

Written in the shadow of the approaching millennium, American literature in the 1990s was beset by bleak announcements of the end of books, the end of postmodernism, and even the end of literature. Yet, as conservative critics marked the century's twilight hours by launching elegies for the conventional canon, American writers proved the continuing vitality of their literature by reinvigorating inherited forms, by adopting and adapting emerging technologies to narrative ends, and by finding new voices that had remained outside that canon for too long. By reading 1990s literature in a sequence...