lect, indicting mass culture for the dissolution and
dissipation of that aristocracy. A few books judged by
tastemakers to possess literary merit managed to at-
tract a wide readership. Among them were John
Irving’sThe Hotel New Hampshire(1981),The Cider
House Rules(1985), andA Prayer for Owen Meany
(1989) and Anne Tyler’sDinner at the Homesick Restau-
rant(1982),The Accidental Tourist(1985), andBreath-
ing Lessons(1988). For the most part, however, a
deep chasm was created between popular and liter-
ary fiction, while no poetry, except that by Maya
Angelou and very few others, was broadly popular.
The formal study of literature was embracing
popular forms. Founded in 1967, the Popular Cul-
ture Association was by the end of the 1980’s near its
peak in membership and influence, and previously
scorned genres such as science fiction, mystery, and
romance were showing up on syllabi everywhere.
However, the leading academic institutions took a
sharp turn toward “theory,” which often meant turn-
ing away from an engagement with details of particu-
lar texts and toward questions about the nature and
function of texts in general. It was a movement of the
discipline toward context and away from text.
Among several schools of literary theory compet-
ing for influence, deconstruction, an import from
France championed by Paul de Man, Jonathan
Culler, Barbara Johnson, and others, was the project
of exposing the fissures in texts that presume to be
univocal and coherent. During the decade in which
Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman nomi-
nated on the national ticket of a major political party
and Sally Ride the first woman to travel into space,
feminist works such asThe Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Centur y Literar y Imag-
ination(1980), by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
exerted a strong influence. So did reader theory,
which represented an emphasis, by Stanley Fish,
Walter J. Ong, and others, on how one goes about
processing a text.
In reaction against the old formalist insistence on
ignoring everything but the text itself, a movement
called the New Historicism, exemplified by Stephen
Greenblatt, insisted on the shifting interplay be-
tween texts and contexts. Ethnocentric theories,
such as the African American studies advanced by
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., called for reading literature
through the prism of race. Postcolonialists such as
Edward Said called for subverting the hegemony of
Eurocentric interpretation. Finally, the discipline
that began to call itself “cultural studies” challenged
the privileged position of literature and, in the work
of Susan Bordo, Janice Radway, and others, exam-
ined all media for evidence of how social structures
shape meaning.
Impact Printed poetry, drama, and fiction certainly
did not vanish at the end of the 1980’s, but the man-
ner in which they were consumed was significantly
altered. In later years, the increased availability of
personal computers and other electronic media ac-
celerated the cultural marginalization of printed
books. Talented authors, many of whom emerged
first during the 1980’s, would continue to create bril-
liant works of literature, but never again would they
command the culture’s attention in the way that
Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, or Alexander
Solzhenitsyn had just a few decades before.
Further Reading
Contemporar y Literature33, no. 2 (Summer, 1992).
This special issue—titledAmerican Poetr y of the
1980’sand edited by Thomas Gardner—contains
ten essays on general trends in American poetry
and particular poets, including John Ashbery,
Charles Bernstein, Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fra-
ser, Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, and C. K. Wil-
liams.
Hendin, Josephine G., ed.A Concise Companion to
Postwar American Literature and Culture. Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Essays by fifteen critics
provide overviews of such phenomena as Ameri-
can drama, gay and lesbian writing, Jewish Ameri-
can fiction, African American literature, and Irish
American writing during the postwar period.
Millard, Kenneth.Contemporar y American Fiction: An
Introduction to American Fiction Since 1970. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Informative
overview of the subject that also provides detailed
analyses of thirty texts by thirty different authors.
O’Brien, Sharon, ed.Write Now: American Literature
in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1996. Twelve essays cover subjects in-
cluding the literature of AIDS, Jay McInerney,
Lyn Hejinian, and Alice Walker.
Spikes, Michael P.Understanding Contemporar y Ameri-
can Literar y Theor y. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2003. This useful guide offers sep-
arate chapters on de Man, Gates, Greenblatt,
Said, Fish, and Bordo.
Steven G. KellmanThe Eighties in America Literature in the United States 595