Literary Influences
Although distinctions can be drawn between works published since 1970 and
those of the previous period, much continuity exists. The minimalist impulse,
emphasis on inarticulateness, and focus on the structure of language can be traced
back to Modernist American writers such as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos
Williams, and Ernest Hemingway. The confessional mode of Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton continues in the work of poets such as Louise Glück, Sharon Olds,
and Simon J. Ortiz, who use aspects of their own lives to draw attention to larger
issues.
Other literary influences come from beyond the borders of the United
States. American writers have always drawn from elsewhere, but in this period
they are drawing from more extensive cultural and narrative sources than ever
before. The “magical realism” of Latin American and Caribbean authors such as
the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and
Julio Cortázar, the Chilean Isabel Allende, and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier
is an important element. The term is also applied to the writing of Europeans
such as the Czech Milan Kundera and the German Günter Grass and Brit-
ish immigrants Salman Rushdie from India and Kazuo Ishiguro from Japan.
These authors incorporate fantastic or mythical elements in otherwise realistic
fiction to illuminate the absurd nature of reality. The post–World War II influ-
ence of the Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett, the Prague-born Austrian fiction
writer Franz Kafka, the French poet André Breton, and the French novelist
and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet can be seen in the fiction of the American
Postmodernists Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth and the
dramas of Edward Albee and Sam Shepard. The blurring of fiction genres in
the work of the Italian writers Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco is also evident
in American writing of the period. Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980; translated as
The Name of the Rose, 1983), for example, combines the historical novel—it is
set in a fourteenth-century monastery—and the detective story. The arrival in
the United States of British author J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series trans-
formed children’s and young-adult fiction into a cultural phenomenon. The
seven novels began with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), which
was published in the United States in 1998 as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone. Its success led The New York Times to create a separate best-seller list
for children’s literature in 2000 and has fostered a huge growth in popularity
of this category of fiction.