Contemporary American Fiction

Contemporary American Fiction is a guide to American fiction since 1970 that offers substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty recent key texts. The book provides an analysis of a wide range of American novels, by established writers such as Updike and Roth, but also by younger writers such as Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie. Millard combines these texts in an innovative critical structure which is designed to stimulate debate on cultural politics and aesthetic value while addressing central areas of American life such as the family, the media, gender, and history.

Contemporary American Fiction provides an introduction to American fiction since 1970. Offering substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty texts by thirty different writers, Millard combines them in an innovative critical structure designed to promote debates on cultural
politics and aesthetic value. The book is the first of its kind to offer a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in the fiction of the United States. Recent novels by established writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth are analyzed alongside the fiction of younger writers such as Gish Jen
and Sherman Alexie. The book's innovative structure encourages new ways of thinking about how American writers might be configured in relation to each other, while providing an analysis of how contemporary fiction has responded to changes in central areas of American life such as the family, the
media, technology, and consumerism. Contemporary American Fiction is a superb critical introduction to some of the most exciting fiction of the last thirty years, an eclectic and thorough advertisement for the extraordinary vitality of American fiction at the end of the twentieth century.