70 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Defamiliarization The process by which literature makes one see the familiar
and everyday anew, thereby enhancing one’s perceptions. The Russian For-
malists coined the term, describing the effect as “making the stone stoney.”
Epistolary Adjective referring to a narrative told through letters. Many of the
earliest British and American novels were epistolary works; Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple (1982) is a contemporary example.
Gothic Dating back to the eighteenth century, refers to literature that involves
the supernatural or the fear that the supernatural is present; the horror is
often more psychological than physical. Traditional Gothic works feature
haunted houses, ghosts, madness, and doubles. In contemporary examples,
such as many works by Joyce Carol Oates, the sense of enclosure and the use
of doubles is maintained.
Graphic novel A long form of “sequential art,” combining text and drawings to
tell a story. Originally designating a narrative that was conceived as a whole
from the start, it is now sometimes used to refer to compilations of comic-
book narratives. The first important graphic novels were Batman: The Dark
Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller; Watchmen (2005), by Alan Moore,
Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins; and the two-volume Maus: A Survivor’s
Tale (1986, 1991), by Art Spiegelman, which was based on the author’s
father’s struggles during the Holocaust and was awarded a special Pulitzer
Prize in 1992.
Heteroglossia The presence in a text of many voices and perspectives.
Hip urban novels A popular genre of the 1980s featuring young city dwell-
ers negotiating drug-laden and promiscuous lifestyles; Jay McInerney, Bret
Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Donna Tartt are the major authors of these
novels. The genre was parodied (see below) in 1989 by Spy magazine in the
book Spy Notes, a take-off on Cliffs Notes. Cliffs Notes sued Doubleday, the
publisher of Spy Notes, but lost the case.
Hispanic Derived from the Latin word for “Spain”; refers to people who are
from, or whose ancestors are from, Spanish-speaking countries. The term is
used by the U.S. Census Bureau and is broader than Latino, which refers to
people of Latin American origin. Thus, a person from Spain can be described
as “Hispanic” but not as “Latino.”
Historical novel A novel set in a particular period in the past and frequently
involving major events of that period. Historical novels often use actual fig-
ures as minor or peripheral characters or as characters who are on stage for a
short period, while the main characters are fictional, as in Michael Chabon’s
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). Alternately, they may
dramatize events in the life of a historical person, as in T. C. Boyle’s The Road
to Wellville (1993), about Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, sanatorium director and
coinventor of cornflakes, and The Inner Circle (2004), about the sex researcher
Dr. Alfred Kinsey; and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), about the
surveyors.
Historiographic metafiction A term coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics
of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988) to describe works that are
markedly self-reflexive (see below), calling attention to their own fictional-