Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Twenty-five essays tracing Greek, Haitian, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Spanish, Chinese,
and other cultural influences on American literature. While they focus on works
from earlier periods, the attention to the diverse and polyglot nature of American
literature offers historical and multicultural contexts necessary for interpreting
contemporary American literature. This work is for advanced students.
Jeanne Rosier Smith, Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Lit-
erature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Taking the premise that tricksters provide the “the power to laugh at old worlds,
and invent new ones,” offers comparative readings of works by Toni Morrison,
Louise Erdrich, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Sandra Stanley, Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U .S. Women of Color (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Fifteen essays that examine the literary and theoretical contributions of women
writers of color, focusing on the impact of issues such as social construction and
identity politics and on the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and
sexuality.
Susan Strehle, Fiction in the Quantum Universe (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1992).
Argues that a strain of contemporary American literature has developed out of
concepts from quantum physics, in which reality is discontinuous, dynamic, rela-
tive, statistical, subjectively seen, indeterminate, and uncertainly known. Nam-
ing this fiction “actualism,” Strehle uses this framework to read major novels
by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret
Atwood, and Donald Barthelme.
Cole Swenson and David St. John, eds., American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of
New Poetry (New York: Norton, 2009).
Introduces a wide range of contemporary experimental and hybrid poets.
Sean Kicummah Teuton, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the
American Indian Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008).
Arguing for a “tribal realist” approach to Native American literature that defines
“knowledge” as a product of self-reflexive and communally mediated work
engaged with the world.
Lex Williford, ed., Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonf iction: Work
from 1970 to the Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).
Based on a survey identifying contemporary nonfiction most read and taught
by “teaching writers,” including examples of the personal essay, memoir, and
journalism.
Williford and Michael Martone, eds., The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary
Short Fiction: 50 North American Stories since 1970, second edition (New York:
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2007).
Notable for the aesthetic and cultural diversity of its selections.