Dominant Genres and Literary Forms
The contemporary period offers such diversity in genres and forms that is difficult
to identify any as “dominant.” The novel continues to be popular, with writers
such as John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and John Updike, who were
working in previous decades, still making important contributions after 1970.
Postmodernist novelists experiment with narrative form, challenging traditional
fiction genres; Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western
(1974), for example, combines elements of Southern Gothic with tropes of the
Western. Other novelists play with the boundaries between fiction and nonfic-
tion. In My Life As a Man (1974) Roth creates the autobiographical Jewish writer
Peter Tarnopol, who recounts his life in the second part of the novel, “My True
Story.” Tarnopol’s short stories, two of which make up the first part of the novel,
“Useful Fictions,” feature Nathan Zuckerman, a name Roth uses for a character in
later novels, and parody Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). E. L. Doctorow’s
The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and Homer
& Langley (2009) combine facts from twentieth-century history with fictional
details. On the basis of a brief account of Margaret Garner’s failed 1856 attempt
to escape from slavery, Morrison imagines Garner’s life in Beloved (1987).
Other writers, shaped by different cultures and experiences, have transformed
the contemporary novel in other ways. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster
Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
(1989), and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999) draw on the immigrant expe-
rience to depict the ways in which individuals lose, maintain, or transform their
cultural identities. Some novelists address the ways identity is complicated by
sexuality. As homosexuality becomes more visible in mainstream society, writ-
ers such as Michael Cunningham find more recognition and readers; his The
Hours (1998) won the Pulitzer Prize. Other important writers on gay and lesbian
themes include Rita Mae Brown, Paula Gunn Allen, Sarah Schulman, Armistead
Maupin, and Edmund White.
The short story has enjoyed a resurgence in this period. Following a slide
in status that accompanied the rising popularity of television and a decline in
magazines featuring short fiction that had begun in the 1950s, short-story col-
lections began again to appear on best-seller lists. Academic literary journals such
as the Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, and Southern Review, along with mass-
market magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s, helped to bring
about the change. Fostered by Gordon Lish, fiction editor at Esquire and then
at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., Raymond Carver paved the way for writers of stories
about working-class lives; many of these writers were labeled “Dirty Realists” or
“minimalists.” Important collections include Andre Dubus’s Adultery and Other
Choices (1977), Russell Banks’s Trailerpark (1981), Ann Beattie’s The Burning
House (1982), Richard Ford’s Rock Springs (1987), and Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shi-
loh and Other Stories (1982). Other writers known for their short stories include
Oates, Dorothy Allison, Annie Proulx, and Pam Houston. A recent development
is the emergence of the extremely short story. Generally consisting of no more
than a thousand words, they are called “sudden” or “flash” fiction; the latter term