Boundaries of the Period
To differentiate them from the forms, modes, sensibilities, and concerns of earlier
periods, many of the literary works published from 1970 through the first decade
of the twenty-first century have been described with labels such as postconfessional,
postfeminist, postracial, postcolonial, poststructural, Postmodernist, and even post-
Postmodernist. The common prefix, however, can be misleading. Attached to
feminist and racial, for example, it gives the impression that gender and racial
equality have been achieved. Postcolonial, too, is misleading: although a nation
may be legally independent, it may still be subordinated culturally and economi-
cally to another. The writings of many American Indians and Native Hawaiians
particularly challenge the idea that colonialism has ended. Even the terms that
refer to form suggest a discontinuity of style and theme that is not always helpful
or accurate. Postconfessional poets, for example, employ the self-revelatory and
personal mode of their predecessors, and Postmodernist and post-Postmodernist
writers, like Modernists, emphasize self-consciousness, fragmentation of nar-
rative structures, ambiguity, and dehumanized and decentered subjects. Rather
than making a definitive break with the styles and concerns of the previous eras,
literature of this period continues to explore themes and ideas related to identity
and reality. The nature of that identity and reality have changed, however, lead-
ing writers to explore representational modes that include both traditional and
innovative elements.
“The world is here,” Ishmael Reed declares in the essay “America: The Mul-
tinational Society” in his Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper
(1988). Contemporary American literature, he says, is “a place where the cultures
of the world crisscross.” The essay argues for a broader meaning of American
identity and reflects on the “blurring of cultural styles” that marks everyday life
in the United States. This multicultural environment, along with technological
advances, philosophical and scientific developments, and changes in the social
order, have transformed the ways Americans view and engage with the world at
home and abroad. This transformation is reflected in literature, where previous
notions about reality and how to represent it are changing. Accordingly, contem-
porary literature is characterized by diversity, proliferation, and fluidity. Works
published from 1970 onward represent many styles, themes, forms, and modes of
delivery. Voices from across the spectrum of American experience offer perspec-
tives not often—or ever—heard in earlier eras of American literature. Writers of
various races, ethnicities, social classes, sexual orientations, and geographic regions
have reenergized and expanded American writing.
The proliferation and diversity of cultural perspectives are accompanied by
the use of literary forms in new and imaginative ways. Writers continue to work
within the traditional forms of poetry, short story, novel, drama, essay, and mem-
oir but also develop and experiment with new and combined forms, including
the short-story cycle, the composite novel, New Journalism, creative nonfiction,
the graphic novel, and the comic book. As genre and identity have come to be
understood in more fluid terms, distinctions between high, or elite, and popular,
or mass, culture have disintegrated. Popular culture has become a subject of seri-