The Cambridge Companion To Don Delillo

With the publication of his seminal novel White Noise, Don DeLillo was elevated into the pantheon of great American writers. His novels are admired and studied for their narrative technique, political themes, and their prophetic commentary on the cultural crises affecting contemporary America. In an age dominated by the image, DeLillo's fiction encourages the reader to think historically about such matters as the Cold War, the assassination of President Kennedy, threats to the environment, and terrorism. This Companion charts the shape of DeLillo's career, his relation to twentieth-century aesthetics, and his major themes. It also provides in-depth assessments of his best-known novels, White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, which have become required reading not only for students of American literature, but for all interested in the history and the future of American culture.

A comprehensive 2011 guide to the genres, historical contexts, cultural diversity and major authors of American fiction since the Second World War.

A fully revised second edition of this multi-author account of Canadian literature, from Aboriginal writing to Margaret Atwood.

This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the novel in America. It explores the work of the most influential American novelists of the past 200 years, including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.

This book demonstrates the complexity of Bellow's work by emphasizing the ways in which it reflects the changing conditions of American identity.

Annotation Linking literary and historical trends, the author underscores the exalted fantasies of postwar American writers as they arose from the new conception of their cultural mission.

Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associated with postmodernism, from the 'pioneers', Beckett, Borges and Burroughs, to important post-war writers such as Pynchon, Carter, Atwood, Morrison, Gibson, Auster, DeLillo, and Ellis. Designed for students and clearly written, this Introduction explains the preoccupations, styles and techniques that unite postmodern authors. Their work is characterized by a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its status as fiction, and by the various ways in which it challenges readers to question common-sense and commonplace assumptions about literature.