Overview
- Interrogates the impact of a derealized sociopolitical landscape on contemporary American literature
- Chapters analyse a wide-ranging selection of contemporary works of fiction
- Continues the tradition of revisionist analysis of cultural representations of “America”
Part of the book series: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (ALTC)
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About this book
This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism—understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective reality—by bringing together analyses of some of the ways in which American writers have responded to the derealization of political culture in the United States and the experience of a ‘new’ American reality after 2016. The volume’s premise is that the disruptions and dislocations that were so exacerbated by the political ascendancy of Trump and his spectacle-laden presidency have unsettled core assumptions about American reality and the possibilities of representation. The blurring of the relationship between fact and fiction, bolstered by the discourses of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ has not only drawn attention to the shattering of any notion of ‘shared’ reality, but has also forced a reexamination of the purpose and value of literature, especially when considering its troubled relation to the representation of ‘America.’ The authors in this collection respond to the invitation to reassess the workings of fiction and critique in an age of Trumpism by considering some of the most recent literary responses to the (new) American realit(ies)—including works by Colson Whitehead, Ben Winters, Claudia Rankine, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, and Steve Erickson, to name but a few—, some of which were composed in the run-up to the 2016 election but were able to accurately and incisively imagine the world to come.
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Keywords
Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Alternative Histories of ‘America’
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Dolores Resano is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin and Visiting Scholar in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her current research project, funded by the European Commission, is focused on contemporary American and European literary fiction from a transatlantic perspective, with a special interest in the intersections of literature, politics, and theories of negative affect. Dr. Resano holds a PhD in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the Universitat de Barcelona, with a dissertation on post-9/11 fiction, satire, and public discourse.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: American Literature in the Era of Trumpism
Book Subtitle: Alternative Realities
Editors: Dolores Resano
Series Title: American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73858-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-73857-0Published: 24 August 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-73860-0Published: 25 August 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-73858-7Published: 23 August 2022
Series ISSN: 2634-579X
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5803
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 291
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: North American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Fiction, Political Science