bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
M
aupin,
A
rmistead
Authors: Gaustad Samuel
Published: August 2017

Armistead Maupin, an openly gay writer, focuses on realistic portrayals of marginal characters, including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, African Americans, and dwarves. He creates unique non‐biological family structures and also attacks hypocrisy by dealing with non‐mainstream individuals, deftly intertwining their stories within a larger societal framework. Additionally, Maupin includes references to contemporary settings, current political events, and popular fashions, so that fictional time feels like “real” time. Because of this, his works function as a subtle catalogue of political and popular culture.
McK
ay,
C
laude
Authors: Rosenberg Leah Reade
Published: August 2017

A poet, novelist, journalist, and political radical, Claude Festus McKay made profound contributions to the formation of the Caribbean, Harlem Renaissance, modernist, Negritude, and queer literary traditions. He belongs to the tradition of black Atlantic public intellectuals, such as C. L. R. James, who brought a Marxist critique to the politics of race and art and challenged dominant conceptions of modernity by placing the black proletariat and peasantry at its center.
Minimalist/Maximalist Fiction
Authors: Rebein Robert
Published: August 2017

The terms “minimalist fiction” and “maximalist fiction” began to be used by writers and critics in the late twentieth century to describe opposing impulses or trends within postmodern American fiction. Minimalist fiction, or minimalism, denotes short works of fiction that combine a terse style and deliberate economy of means with ordinary, even mundane subject matter. The short stories of Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Richard Ford, among others, have been associated with this style. The term “maximalist fiction,” or maximalism, meanwhile, denotes fictional works, particularly novels, that are unusually long and complex, are digressive in style, and make use of a wide array of literary devices and techniques. Among the novelists associated with this style are David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Rick Moody, William T. Vollmann, and, from a slightly older generation, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Paul West. In their separate ways, both minimalism and maximalism have been explained as responses to the declining relevance of literary fiction in a cultural landscape dominated by newer media such as television, video games, and the Internet.
Modernist Fiction
Authors: Suárez Juan A.
Published: August 2017

Initially, “modernist fiction” named the experimental narrative of the interwar period, most eminently associated with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, and, secondarily, with Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and Willa Cather. Their masterpieces belonged to “the jazz age,” even though Stein started publishing before, Faulkner's best work appeared during the 1930s, and some of these writers remained active until the early 1960s. Early approaches to this work were formal, influenced by the New Criticism, and when historically minded scholars like Alfred Kazin or Lionel Trilling discussed this literature, they tended to invoke a mixture of biographical and national motifs, such as individual alienation before a mercantilist society indifferent to aesthetic value or the disillusionment of a generation marked by World War I.
M
oore,
L
orrie
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

With just three collections of short stories and three novels to her credit, Lorrie Moore has established herself as one of the premiere American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Born in 1957 in the Adirondack town of Glenn Falls, New York, she attended St. Lawrence's University as an English major, winning her first writing award from
Seventeen
magazine while an undergraduate. Following graduation, she worked in New York for two years as a paralegal, then entered Cornell University's MFA program, where she studied with Alison Lurie. She began publishing stories while at Cornell; the first gathering of her work,
Self‐Help
(1985), was published to strong acclaim, and initiated a slow but steady succession of meticulously crafted stories and novels remarkable for their subtle rendering of voices and interiorities. Moore is currently the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison, where she has spent her teaching career; she has won the O. Henry Award for her story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” and the Rea Award for the Short Story, and has been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
M
orris,
W
right
Authors: Barrett Laura
Published: August 2017

The publication of two novels,
My Uncle Dudley
(1942) and
The Man Who Was There
(1945), and two “photo‐texts,”
The Inhabitants
(1972a [1946]) and
The Home Place
(1968 [1948]), inaugurated Wright Morris's dual career as a photographer and writer. The hybridity of the “photo‐text” illustrated his simultaneous interest in and talent for photography and writing as well as his temporal and stylistic position on the cusp of modernism and postmodernism. A postmodern sense of exhaustion, exacerbated by an inability to represent and, therefore, respond to the real thing, permeates Morris's fiction. “[O]ur only inexhaustible resource at the moment,” argues Morris, “is the cliche” (1978 [1957], 12). In response to his sharp criticism of nostalgic and derivative fiction, Morris experimented with narrative form and style, often creating a hallucinatory atmosphere in which reality commingles with absurdity, and pseudo‐objective narration is juxtaposed with subjective stream of consciousness. Morris's expansive career includes 19 novels, three memoirs, four collections of essays, dozens of short stories, and multiple photo‐texts and photography books.
Noir Fiction
Authors: Eburne Jonathan P.
Published: August 2017

Noir fiction is a hybrid genre. The coinage of the term
film noir
to describe US crime films popular in France after the end of World War II gave generic coherence to an otherwise disparate body of American film and fiction. Noir fiction, like noir film, emerged as a label useful for describing works that exploit the conventions of mystery fiction, especially with regard to the genre's presumptions about social order: that crime can be punished, that justice can be restored, or that there is even such a thing as a social order.
The Novel and War
Authors: Norris Margot
Published: August 2017

The twentieth century saw two World Wars and two other significant Asian conflicts with military participation by the United States. Although none of these wars took place on American soil, they entrained millions of US soldiers in combat. Of these conflicts, World War II, with its 78 million casualties over a four‐year period, was the most traumatic. Although the necessity of military conflict to halt German genocidal aggression and brutal Japanese militarism remains relatively uncontroversial, the extent and scope of human and national destruction continue to stagger the imagination. Literature, practiced to represent individual trauma and tragedy, remains largely unprepared to address killing and wounding in such large numbers. Holocaust writers have struggled with this difficulty for decades, a challenge that has become more and more acute as recognition of the event's scope and cruelty has grown and solidified over time. But in spite of the war's necessity, the excesses, corruptions, and illogicality of militarism often led to cynical accounts that were conveyed through generic subversions and inventions by American novelists. American novels of World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War will here bracket the more extended discussion of American World War II fiction, and will focus largely on novels of combat written by author‐veterans. Here, especially, the dark, comic vision of many American war novels manifests an understanding that words were inadequate to World War II unless they were transformed into radically challenging signs and gestures.
O
ates,
J
oyce
C
arol
Authors: Cologne‐Brookes Gavin
Published: August 2017

Joyce Carol Oates is not only the most prolific of contemporary literary writers but also extraordinarily diverse. For Oates, the composing of fiction is an activity integral to human life and so stretches across all genres. Including the sophisticated thrillers published under her (known) pseudonyms, Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, she is the author of over 50 novels, as well as more than 30 story collections, a dozen volumes of essays, and several collections of poetry and plays. She has also written for young adults and for children, edited numerous anthologies, and been closely involved with the
Ontario Review
, which ran until the death of her husband, its founder and editor Raymond Smith, in 2008. Oates produced the bulk of this work while also pursuing a career first at the University of Windsor, Ontario, and since 1978 at Princeton. Her literary fiction depicts multiple cross‐sections of American culture from the Depression era of her birth into the twenty‐first century, with forays into nineteenth‐and early‐twentieth‐century culture.
O
rtiz,
S
imon
J
.
Authors: Hafen P. Jane
Published: August 2017

Simon J. Ortiz, a member of the Acoma Pueblo, comes from a legacy of indigenous people who have lived in the same place since their sense of the beginning of time. His genre‐crossing writings reflect the heritage of location, community, and language. Ortiz was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1941. He was reared in the village of McCartys, where his family spoke their native Keres language. After working in a uranium mine and a stint in the military, Ortiz attended school at Ft. Lewis, Colorado and the University of New Mexico. As a student at the MFA workshop at the University of Iowa, Ortiz joined the rank of university‐trained American Indian writers like N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), James Welch (Blackfeet), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). Although sometimes categorized as a writer of the Native American Renaissance, Ortiz's awardwinning writing reveals a timeless heritage that ties back to place, language, and sovereignty.
P
arker,
D
orothy
Authors: Pettit Rhonda S.
Published: August 2017

Dorothy Parker wrote and published short fiction from 1922 to 1958, and she was perhaps best known as a humorous voice of the Roaring Twenties. Parker's intimate examination of human motivation and behavior transcends the early twentieth century. Formally, her stories combine the linearity of traditional fiction with modernist and even postmodernist prose techniques: irony, satire, stream‐of‐consciousness narration, imagistic concision, and minimal authorial presence. Her characters tend to be alienated, intellectually shallow, or dishonest individuals who lack self‐awareness and therefore wreak havoc on their own or other's lives. Her themes include sexual dynamics; critiques of domesticity; social, racial, and economic justice; and war.
P
ercy,
W
alker
Authors: Mitchell Douglas L.
Published: August 2017

Walker Percy was a novelist, physician, and semiotician from the American South. Born on May 28, 1916 in Birmingham, Alabama, he was orphaned at an early age and adopted by a patrician uncle. Percyattended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later graduated from Columbia University's medical school. A bout of tuberculosis ended his medical internship.
P
etry,
A
nn
Authors: Williams Jennifer D.
Published: August 2017

For her critically acclaimed
The Street
(1946), Ann Petry became the first African American woman to pen a bestselling novel. Having sold over 2 million copies to date, Petry's debut novel has also defined somewhat narrowly a writing career that spanned over 40 years and encompassed fiction, short stories, literary criticism, and children's literature. Petry stated her desire to be remembered for all of her work. Doing so uncovers a writer who strayed from genre conventions while adhering to her conviction in literature's usefulness as a tool of social criticism.
Postmodernist Fiction
Authors: Hoberek Andrew
Published: August 2017

First invoked in response to the mid‐twentieth‐century waning of modernism's revolutionary energies, postmodernism is among the most slippery and frequently debated terms in literary history. At its most coherent, the term specifies writing that inverts features associated with the modernist literature of the early twentieth century: where modernism promotes depth psychology, postmodernism offers deliberately flat characterization; where modernism upholds the boundary between high and low culture, postmodernism blurs this boundary; where modernism emphasizes control and structure, postmodernism incorporates contingency and play; where the modernist artist strives, in the words of James Joyce, to be “invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (1999), the postmodernist endlessly intrudes and comments upon the work in progress. Yet to the extent that this account casts postmodernism as the rebellious child of a stern father (with the masculine gender dynamic that this implies), it overstates the differences between modernism and postmodernism and oversimplifies the internal differences within each category. One of the major debates about postmodernism concerns whether it overturns or continues the modernist project. And indeed this is not surprising given that postmodernism arises in response to the midcentury institutionalization of modernism, seeking to overturn its predecessor in the interest of reviving and extending modernism's own revolt against the canons of proper literary taste (Huyssen 1986). Both modernism and postmodernism, moreover, set themselves against the majority of twentieth‐century literature, which remains committed to realism. In this respect we can define postmodernism most simply as the twentieth century's second great flowering of experimental, anti‐realist fiction.
P
owell,
D
awn
Authors: Page Tim
Published: August 2017

Largely underappreciated during her lifetime, Dawn Powell was a prolific American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and diarist whose life and works were discovered posthumously by an erudite and passionate group of authors, critics, and general readers in the 1980s and 1990s. Powell called herself a “permanent visitor” to New York City, her adopted home for the last 47 years of her life. Throughout all, she retained a certain practicality and common sense often associated with her native Midwest that permitted her to see through the foibles of Manhattan high life and low. Most of her novels are set in either Ohio or New York: the earlier cycle – best represented by
Dance Night
(1930) and
Come Back to Sorrento
(1932) – tends to be tender, poignant, and bucolic, while the latter group – of which
Turn, Magic Wheel
(1936) and
A Time to Be Born
(1942) are two superior examples – is fast‐paced, satirical, and often scathingly funny.
R
and,
A
yn
Authors: Gladstein Mimi Reisel
Published: August 2017

Ayn Rand is a novelist and philosopher whose works, though often dismissed by the mainstream critical establishment, continue to sell well more than a generation after her death. Rand wrote romantic fiction that championed individualism, freedom, and laissez‐faire capitalism; her philosophy inspired adherents in the political and business worlds. Rand's abilities as a creative writer are all the more remarkable when one realizes that English was not her native language. Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia on February 2, 1905. She graduated from the University of Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) with a degree in history, and then attended the State Institute for Cinematography in Leningrad to learn screenwriting. Always an independent thinker, Rand was fortunate to be able to leave Soviet Russia to visit family in Chicago; she never returned. Unlike some immigrants who retain a nostalgia for their mother countries, Rand abhorred Russia and was a committed US patriot, calling the United States “the noblest country in the history of men” in her breakthrough novel,
The Fountainhead
(1943, 715). Rand fought all her life against the various collectivist forces that worked to change the individualistic and capitalistic character of the country.
Russ,Joanna
Authors: Teslenko Tatiana
Published: August 2017

An internationally acclaimed author, Joanna Russ takes up issues pioneered by feminist theorists in the 1960s and explores them in many genres, from mainstream fiction to fantasy and utopia, offering unique visions of the future and unprecedented activist solutions. Thematically, her fiction focuses on identity, difference, gender roles, power, oppression, and violence. She also writes profound criticism of feminist theory and history.
S
alinger,
J. D.
Authors: Price Jonathan L.
Published: August 2017

J[erome] D[avid] Salinger is known for fiction concerned primarily with children and adolescents who search for religious fulfillment and moral rigor against a society obsessed with materialism, sentimentalism, and religious hypocrisy or misunderstanding; simultaneously he is the most mysterious figure in American fiction. Author of one of the most famous American novels of mid‐century,
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951), he stopped publishing fiction abruptly in 1967 and has remained largely aloof from public life.
Silko,LeslieMarmon
Authors: Masters Joshua J.
Published: August 2017

Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most important Native American writers to emerge since the 1960s, and her first novel,Ceremony(1977), now a staple in college English classes, has received more critical attention than any other Native American novel. Silko was born on March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico to Lee Marmon Silko and May Virginia Leslie and raised among her extended family in Laguna, the principal village of the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. A gifted learner, Silko entered the University of New Mexico at age 17. In 1969 she earned her BA, published her first short story, and entered the university's law school, leaving in 1971. In 1973 she began working onCeremony, and, bolstered by an NEA fellowship in 1974, became a full‐time writer. During the past four decades she has published poetry, short fiction, non‐fiction, autobiography, and novels, the genre for which she is best known.
S
inger,
I
saac
B
ashevis
Authors: Herman Peter C.
Published: August 2017

Highly prolific, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–July 24, 1991) wrote over 16 novels, 12 books of short stories, children's books, memoirs, and numerous non‐fiction essays and more works as yet untranslated. His collected short fiction is available in editions published by the Library of America. Singer came to prominence with the publication of his short story “Gimpel the Fool” in 1953, and by the 1960s he regularly published stories in the
New Yorker
and mass‐circulation magazines. Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.
S
miley,
J
ane
Authors: Nakadate Neil
Published: August 2017

Jane Smiley is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist; she was awarded the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for
A Thousand Acres
(1991). Her career reflects an early and ongoing interest in diverse subjects and fictional genres, and her many essays, articles, and reviews cover a wide range of cultural, social, economic, and political issues. Smiley was elected to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 2001, and in 2006 received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award.
S
orrentino,
G
ilbert
Authors: Riker Martin
Published: August 2017

One of the great formal innovators of twentieth‐century letters, Gilbert Sorrentino was and remains an unclassifiable writer. Although an accomplished poet and superior critic, he is known primarily for over 20 works of fiction, each of which creates or appropriates its own set of styles, characters, and narrative strategies, the author finding in each new work an opportunity to reinvent his art in startlingly original ways.
S
tephenson,
N
eal
Authors: Lewis Jonathan P.
Published: August 2017

Neal Town Stephenson's first two novels,
The Big U
(1984) and
Zodiac
(1988), would likely have been forgotten had it not been for the explosive popularity of his breakthrough novel
Snow Crash
(1992). Combining cyberpunk's fusion of Japanese anime and Samurai cultures and American noir with the “The Metaverse,” an immersive virtual reality that inspired Second Life and other massively multiplayer online role‐playing games (MMORPGs),
Snow Crash
established Stephenson's voice in contemporary American literature.
The Diamond Age
(1995) and
Cryptonomicon
(1999a) proved that Stephenson sees clearly that the development of new technologies is the driving force in human cultures, but that such innovations can be enslaving and terrorizing while claiming to liberate and entertain.
S
tyron,
W
illiam
Authors: Cologne‐Brookes Gavin
Published: August 2017

William Styron's literary significance rests on the enduring impact of ambitious, risk‐laden novels. His work explores difficult subject matter with an elegant complexity achieved through years of composition. Entwined with this is his experience with clinical depression, about which he writes with characteristic eloquence. His depressive tendency was perhaps partly circumstantial. Born William Clark Styron, Jr. in Newport News, Virginia in 1925, he was 13 when his mother died of cancer. But it may also have been a genetic inheritance from his father, an engineer in shipbuilding. Lost mother‐figures and supportive father‐figures feature prominently in a body of fiction that is also of epic historical scope.
Traven,B
Authors: Henkel Scott
Published: August 2017

B. Traven is the most commonnom de plumefor the author who also used the names Ret Marut, Hal Croves, and Traven Torsvan, among others. Traven's works includeThe Death Ship(1926), which is rumored to be the book Albert Einstein would have taken to a desert island; the six Jungle Novels (1931–40); andThe Treasure of the Sierra Madre(1927), later adapted into John Huston's 1948 film starring Humphrey Bogart. Traven's line, delivered by a Mexican rebel to Bogart's character, Dobbs, is one of the most famous in American film: “Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!” Like his rebel character, Traven's ideas place him in a dissenting literary tradition, and his secrecy makes him an archetype of the reclusive, wandering American author.
Tyler,Anne
Authors: Sweeney Susan Elizabeth
Published: August 2017

Anne Tyler's keen observation, acute sense of comedy and tragedy, and distinctive voice transcend such categories as “Southern literature” or “domestic fiction.” With increasing subtlety, her 17 novels explore how individuals develop relationships with others.
V
ollmann,
W
illiam
T.
Authors: Rebein Robert
Published: August 2017

William T. Vollmann is a prolific author of fiction and non‐fiction whose sprawling, eclectic works make use of an array of literary techniques to explore themes of violence, poverty, addiction, and the historical tendency of the strong to dominate the weak. Best known for the maximalist length of his work (a typical Vollmann novel runs 700 pages, and one of his books, the seven‐volume
Rising Up and Rising Down
, exceeds 3,300 pages), Vollmann has received high praise for his preternatural talent and ambition as a writer; however, in‐depth critical attention to his work has not always followed, with the result that, 20 years into his remarkable career, William Vollmann finds himself in the paradoxical position of being one of the highest regarded and yet least read authors in contemporary American literature.
W
elty,
E
udora
A
lice
Authors: Kreyling Michael
Published: August 2017

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 13, 1909 and raised in a household filled with books and reading. She graduated from high school at the age of 16, attended Mississippi State College for women for two years, and finished her BA (English) at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison in 1929. In 1930 she went to Columbia University, where she enrolled in an advertising and secretarial program. New York City was a bigger classroom, but Welty's education outside the South was cut off when her father died in 1931. She would return many times for visits, and even worked at the
New York Times Book Review
during World War II, but Jackson remained her home and the hub of her writing career for the rest of her life. She died July 23, 2001.
W
est,
N
athanael
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: August 2017

Nathanael West (1903–40), novelist, screenwriter, and one of the funniest and most despairing satirists of the twentieth century, published only two novels and two novellas, yet his critical esteem has risen sharply since his death at the age of 37. In the charged political climate of the 1930s, West's books, as he put it, seemed to “meet no needs except [his] own.” They were too bleak for leftist radicals, too mired in the world of consumer culture for highbrow critics, too crude for the popular press. Today, however, West's fiction – with its canny attention to the psychological dynamics of mass and consumer culture; its devastating skepticism about American nationalism, nativism, and naive folksiness; its avant garde deployment of nihilistic humor in the service of social critique; and its deft borrowing of the forms, cliches, and idioms of American popular culture – is as fresh and relevant as ever. As a shrewd analyst of the politics of sentiment, as a Hollywood writer, and as a late modernist obsessed with the status of America‐as‐simulacra, West has also proven a crucial figure in the broad reassessment of literary modernism over the last decade, which has proven more hospitable to “bad” modernisms that challenge the high modernist caricature of aesthetic arch‐seriousness.
W
hite,
E
dmund
Authors: Radel Nicholas F.
Published: August 2017

Perhaps more than any other author, Edmund White provides the literary and social outlines for understanding that moment in American history when homosexuality was transformed from a psychiatric condition to an identity. His dominant themes are the legitimacy of gay lives and sexual experiences and the differences between homosexual and heterosexual social identities.
W
ideman,
J
ohn
E
dgar
Authors: Tusmith Bonnie
Published: August 2017

John Edgar Wideman is an African American writer of extraordinary skill, intellect, and commitment. His literary career spans some 40 years with 18 books and numerous essays, including 10 novels, four volumes of short stories, and four memoirs. Born in Washington, DC in 1941, he was raised in Homewood, a black community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he won all‐Ivy status on the basketball team and, subsequently, attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
W
ilder,
T
hornton
Authors: Bunge Nancy
Published: August 2017

Thornton Wilder aspired to write so well that his work would help his contemporaries understand the importance of treating each other kindly.
W
olfe,
T
om
Authors: Mustazza Leonard
Published: August 2017

Tom Wolfe is a prolific journalist, essayist, and novelist whose innovative style and astute social commentaries have had a profound influence on American intellectual life for more than a half century. He was one of the founders of the 1960s school of writing known as the New Journalism and the inventor of pervasive cultural catchphrases, including “Radical Chic,” the “Me Generation,” and the “Right Stuff.” His 1987 novel,
The Bonfire of the Vanities
, virtually defined the political and social climate of the 1980s and continues to serve as a cultural touchstone for New York City politics.
W
right,
R
ichard
Authors: Walters Wendy W.
Published: August 2017

Richard Wright was the most famous African American novelist of his era, and remains today one of the most prominent black writers in the world. His work spans multiple genres, including the short story, autobiography, novel, poetry, travelogue, essay, and haiku. He was the first African American writer to be able to support himself (and his family) solely from his writing, which has been widely translated throughout the world.
Native Son
(1940c), Wright's most successful novel, was published to great acclaim by Harper and Brothers, a major American publisher. It was a landmark event since this was the first African American novel to be offered by the Book of the Month Club as one of its main selections. Wright's work is philosophically driven by the major ideas and movements that influenced his life and his reading, including social realism, communism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. He was particularly interested in the ways an individual is shaped by his or her environment. Wright's upbringing in poverty in the Jim Crow American South, his migration to the urban North of Chicago, and his final expatriation in France all shaped his ideas and helped mold his global perspectives on literature, politics, and the human condition.
A
nderson,
J
essica
Authors: Sheridan Susan
Published: August 2017

Australian novelist Jessica Anderson first gained widespread acclaim for
Tirra Lirra by the River
(1978), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her first three novels, published in England and misleadingly marketed as genre fiction, attracted little attention. In the 1980s, however, Australian publishing developed rapidly, igniting a renewed interest in Australian fiction as well as a significant new audience for women writers. In this encouraging milieu Anderson enjoyed the reception she had long deserved, becoming one of the major female voices of a period in which it seemed as though Australian women writers had regained the dominance in fiction they enjoyed in the 1930s. Their number included several other women of Anderson's generation, such as Elizabeth Jolley, who had also been “late starters.”
A
rasanayagam,
J
ean
Authors: Rambukwella Harshana
Published: August 2017

A richly lyrical diction that speaks to themes of collective and individual identity, positioned within narratives of national belonging and unbelonging, has long characterized Jean Arasanayagam's literary craft. Dutch Burgher by birth and married to a Tamil, Arasanayagam has articulated the creative tensions arising from the confluence in Sri Lanka of these multiple heritages, or what she has described as her “split‐inheritance” (Arasanayagam 2008). She is one of few resident anglophone Sri Lankan writers to be published internationally. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into several languages, and she has held several international writing fellowships. Beginning with poetry, Arasanayagam's oeuvre has expanded over the years to include a significant body of prose.
A
twood,
M
argaret
Authors: Sugars Cynthia
Published: August 2017

“We need to know about here, because here is where we live,” wrote Margaret Atwood in her landmark literary manifesto,
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(1972b, 19). Atwood has contributed to that literature in myriad ways, becoming the twentieth century's most celebrated and well‐known Canadian writer. It is not an exaggeration to say that Atwood put Canada on the literary map. She was a central voice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, promoting the importance of Canadian national identity against the cultural inferiority complex that had come to dominate Canadian society, particularly in relation to the United States.
Survival
became something of a rallying cry to writers and readers of that generation. However, it is not only the politics of Canadian nationalism that has informed Atwood's writing. She has taken on many of the political and social issues of her time, including women's equality, violence against women, totalitarianism, religious fundamentalism, environmentalism, genetic modification, American cultural imperialism, consumerism, freedom of speech, authors' rights, Amnesty International, and many more. Atwood is an enviably multitalented writer and thinker: a poet, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, editor, satirist, children's author, painter and illustrator, cultural commentator, and mentor to numerous Canadian writers.
Australian Fiction
Authors: Bennett Bruce
Published: August 2017

Australia became postcolonial in 1901, when the six colonies federated and formed the Commonwealth of Australia. The 1880s and 1990s had produced a crop of writers who tested an emergent sense of Australian identity against British values and attitudes. The outstanding literary figure of this period was the short story writer Henry Lawson, whoseWhile the Billy Boils(1896) andJoe Wilson and His Mates(1901) explored Australian frontier masculinity and mateship, and their limits. Joseph Furphy's novelSuch is Life(1903), sometimes referred to as Australia'sMoby‐Dick, interweaves the voices of outback bullock drivers with a freewheeling set of philosophical speculations by the autodidactic narrator Tom Collins, whose favorite writer is Shakespeare. Steele Rudd's stories were also born in the nineteenth century but continued well into the twentieth. FromOn Our Selection(1899) toDad Rudd MP(1940), Rudd's stories comically dramatize the hardships and ingenuity of rural Australian “battlers.”
B
ail,
M
urray
Authors: Attridge John
Published: August 2017

Murray Bail occupies a unique place in recent Australian literature, combining self‐conscious formalism with an idiosyncratic vision of Australianness. His small, highly wrought oeuvre appears as a bold attempt to redefine the fiction of national identity, eschewing the canons of realism in favor of a more cosmopolitan modernist tradition.
C
allaghan,
M
orley
Authors: Hill Colin
Published: August 2017

Morley Callaghan was among the most significant Canadian novelists of the mid twentieth century. In his early career, he was an originator of Canadian modern realism and was connected with international modernists including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Sherwood Anderson. Although he wrote fiction until his death in 1990, he is best known for his first two collections of short fiction –
A Native Argosy
(1929) and
Now That April's Here
(1936) – and for a string of social, urban realist novels published between 1928 and 1937 which were widely read in Canada. His fiction is characterized by a stark realism, a leftist political stance, sustained interest in moral and religious questions, and a sociological and naturalistic interest in human nature and experience.
Canadian Fiction
Authors: Ivison Douglas
Published: August 2017

The twentieth century may not have belonged to Canada, as Sir Wilfrid Laurier famously predicted it would, but it may have belonged to Canadian literature. By the end of the century, the literary institutions and infrastructure necessary for a viable national literature were firmly in place, and Canadian fiction writers had taken their place among the world's leading writers in English.
C
haudhuri,
A
mit
Authors: Galván Fernando
Published: August 2017

Amit Chaudhuri achieved public and critical acclaim as a novelist in the last decade of the twentieth century. He is the author of five novels and a short story collection, as well as poetry, criticism, and reviews. His first two novels received important literary prizes in Britain:
A Strange and Sublime Address
(1991) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia), having also been shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and
Afternoon Raag
(1993) was recognized with the Encore Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize.
Freedom Song
(1998) and
A New World
(2000) have been successful in the US and India:
Freedom Song
received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, and
A New World
the 2002 Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest honor for a single book. However, his confessed vocation has always been that of a poet, singer, and musician, and he has published
St. Cyril Road and Other Poems
and an academic monograph on D. H. Lawrence. As a musician, Chaudhuri is trained in Indian classical singing but has also been influenced by rock music. He has performed with his group in India and in several European countries, and in 2007 released a CD entitled
This Is Not Fusion
.
C
larke,
A
ustin
Authors: Algoo‐Baksh Stella
Published: August 2017

Austin Chesterfield Clarke has been a significant voice in the rise of Canadian and Caribbean literature to international prominence. His novels, short stories, and autobiography transcend the national contexts of their settings, achieving thematic coherence in their persistent probing of marginalization, emasculation, and fractured identity within segments of the African diaspora. In energetic and often witty prose, though with an initial predilection for linear narrative, Clarke targets the inequities and attendant evils of Barbadian colonial life, but he also penetrates the calm surface of Canadian society to explore the social and psychological destitution faced by black West Indian immigrant groups just beginning the struggle, in defiance of white hegemony, to articulate a cultural identity.
C
liff,
M
ichelle
Authors: Richards Constance S.
Published: August 2017

Transnational feminist writer Michelle Cliff engages issues of identity, home/exile, marginality, and national struggle in her essays, short stories, novels, and poetry. As a novelist, Cliff is perhaps best known for her Clare Savage novels,
Abeng
(1984) and
No Telephone to Heaven
(1987). The protagonist, light‐skinned, mixed‐race, Jamaican‐born Clare Savage, is, according to Cliff, somewhat biographical. Like her protagonist, Cliff was born in Jamaica (on November 2, 1946) but emigrated to the US at a young age, returning periodically to Jamaica to attend school. In her 1985 essay “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire,” Cliff describes how her separation from her darker‐skinned friend Zoe at a private, all‐girls English school in Kingston reinforced the sort of caste system into which she was born. Following her 1974 PhD at Warburg Institute in London, Cliff published a collection of prose poems entitled
Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise
(1980) in which she explores color prejudice and its effects, a topic that became a central focus of her novels.
C
ollins,
M
erle
Authors: Lima Maria Helena
Published: August 2017

Merle Collins's writing affirms the power of an oral tradition – with proverbs, riddles, and folktales interspersed in the French Creole and English spoken in Grenada – to tease out the truths behind that country's post‐independence reality. While living, at different times, between Grenada and the United States, and Grenada and England, Collins continues to write about Grenada, attempting to reimagine the land she first knew as home. Her poems and narratives constitute meditations on history, like
“Tout Moun ka Pléwé
(Everybody Bawling),” which follows Grenadians' struggles to survive both hurricanes and revolutions not born in nature. The questions Collins seeks to answer – whether some kind of colonialism is inevitable and whether her nation's destiny is necessarily one of dependence – are central to the majority of the world's peoples.
Coupland,Douglas
Authors: Gray Brenna Clarke
Published: August 2017

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, nonfiction writer, and visual artist who rose to prominence with the publication of the bestsellingGeneration Xin 1991. Coupland's writing and art focuses primarily on making meaning out of popular culture and postmodern life, as well as the corresponding issues of consumerism, religion and spirituality, and the formation of identity.
D
abydeen,
D
avid
Authors: Macedo Lynne
Published: August 2017

Acclaimed novelist and poet David Dabydeen is a professor of literary studies at the University of Warwick, a critic and broadcaster, and an ambassador‐at‐large for his native Guyana. Aspects of his multifaceted affiliations and hybrid personality are clearly reflected in his fiction, which contains discernible traces of his Caribbean background but nonetheless ranges freely across cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries.
Detective/Crime Fiction
Authors: Strongman Kenneth
Published: August 2017

Crime fiction, also known as detective fiction, is a major genre of twentieth‐century world fiction in terms of number of titles, sales, and variety, though some critics view it as a poor cousin of general fiction. However, during the last 30 or 40 years a large body of critical literature has grown up around crime fiction, and it has begun to acquire an academic imprimatur. Perhaps because of sales, critical interest, and forays into the genre by some writers of “literary” fiction, the boundaries between crime and general fiction have become blurred. In some cases, such blurring might be better described as a transcending of boundaries as crime fiction writers consider things social and cultural as well as criminal. Crime fiction may also transcend traditional national and cultural boundaries, as, for example, inA Shadow of Myself(2001) by the black British novelist Mike Phillips, in which English, German, and African cultures each play their part in a multigenerational narrative. Defining crime fiction is therefore no easy matter. Add to this the problems of defining “postcolonial” – the predominant rubric under which world fiction is now studied – and the difficulties multiply.
D
uggan,
M
aurice
Authors: Richards Ian
Published: August 2017

Maurice Duggan is famous for his short stories and for helping introduce Joycean modernist techniques into New Zealand literature. He ranks with Katherine Mansfield and Frank Sargeson among New Zealand's greatest literary stylists. Since novels were only sporadically produced in mid‐twentieth‐century New Zealand, the short story at that time was considered the mainstay of local fiction.
D
uncan,
S
ara
J
eannette
Authors: Fiamengo Janice
Published: August 2017

In the novels, short stories, travel accounts, and journalism that she published over 30 years, Sara Jeannette Duncan was predominantly a social satirist. In her most popular work, the satire is comic and forgiving; in her mature fiction, which explored the themes of modern womanhood and imperial politics, her Horatian perspective is darkened by mordant irony and an emphasis on failed ideals. A Canadian‐born writer who adopted an international perspective and did most of her work while living in India (with extended visits to London), Duncan produced a varied output of 22 books united by an interest in representative national types and in the conflict between personal desire and social duty.
EastAsian Fiction
Authors: Liao Ping‐Hui
Published: August 2017

In recent decades, many East Asian novelists have made their names in the English‐speaking world. Works by Teresa Cha, Ha Jin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, and others are often considered representative of the previously neglected voices of Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Ha Jin, for example, has written extensively on life within and outside China. HisWaiting(1999) andWar Trash(2004) both won the PEN/Faulkner Award;The Writer as Migrant(2008) offers revealing accounts of his literary career. Anchee Min, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution and, like Ha Jin, an emigrant to the US, has produced several narratives (RedAzalea, 1994;Becoming Madame Mao, 2001; andEmpress Orchid, 2004) that raised controversy for their portrayal of lesbian relationships or their sympathetic treatment of the lives of Jiang Ching and Empress Cixi. As an expatriate, Ha Jin is more frequently considered Asian American than East Asian, and it is unfortunate that twentieth‐century Asian literature most often catches the attention of Western readers when written in English, since “major” authors in Asian countries tend to write in their native languages. Indeed, when Eileen Zhang, one of China's leading fiction writers, tried in the 1970s to rewrite her novels in English, they met with a lukewarm reception. To fully appreciate fictions from East Asia as part of the emergent world literature, English‐language readers should read works in translation.
E
kwensi,
C
yprian
Authors: Prescott Joshua D.
Published: August 2017

The Nigerian novelist and short story writer Cyprian Ekwensi, often called the “Nigerian Defoe,” was celebrated for his versatility as a writer, particularly for his ability to portray contemporary urban life in Nigeria in straightforward and engaging prose. Ekwensi's contribution to early Nigerian literature is surpassed only by that of his two contemporaries, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
F
ernando,
L
loyd
Authors: Chiu M. Y.
Published: August 2017

Lloyd Fernando is a pioneering figure in Malaysian literature in English. His work is marked by a generous, inclusive humanism that transcends cultural, ethnic, and religious differences. His two novels and his collection of essays on literature and culture, though not conceived as a single project, explore common themes of tolerance and mutual accommodation.
Film/Television Adaptation and Fiction
Authors: Mota Miguel
Published: August 2017

Film adaptations of literary texts can be traced back to the very early days of the commercial cinema, and countless numbers of twentieth‐century works of world fiction in English have found themselves adapted and reproduced for the visual medium of film and, later, television. The literary and film industries have both undoubtedly benefited from this relationship between media; yet the affiliation, invested as it is in both aesthetic and economic considerations, has often also been highly fraught and contentious. The relationship has been necessarily symbiotic, and as such has been marked since its inception by complications arising from the collision between different ideological, cultural, and economic spaces.
F
ranklin,
M
iles
Authors: Martin Sylvia
Published: August 2017

Miles Franklin wrote fiction over a vital period in Australia's history, from federation to the mid twentieth century. Believing fervently in a distinctly Australian literature that would be led by women, she herself was a paradox: secretive and enigmatic, prickly and outspoken. Her writer colleague and first biographer, Marjorie Barnard, stated that “Miles writing is indivisible from Miles living” and that any account of her must present her life and writing “as one organic whole” (p. xv). The woman who wrote under a confusing array of pseudonyms, some of which were revealed only through her papers after her death, remains an intriguing puzzle today.
G
allant,
M
avis
Authors: Dvorak Marta
Published: August 2017

Recognized internationally as one of the best short story writers in English, Canadian expatriate Mavis Gallant is the author of over 100 stories as well as novels, plays, and essays. She has won prestigious literary awards (the Governor General's Literary Award, the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, the PEN/Nabokov Award, and the Prix Athanase‐David) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has a long history of publishing with the
New Yorker
, a special relationship that allowed her to write full‐time well before her work received widespread critical attention. Gallant's work shows how art can draw on displaced, double, or plural identities to find new angles on reality and generate radical reformulations of language, form, and ideas. Reading her fiction within overlapping aesthetic movements shows that her diverse roots and intercultural practices enable her to usher into Canada the discordance and de‐centering of the modernist and postmodern movements.
G
ee,
M
aurice
Authors: Jones Lawrence
Published: August 2017

In a prolific career of over 50 years, Maurice Gee has shown a consistent process of growth and development within and modification of an established tradition, the critical realism of such predecessors as Frank Sargeson. His fiction presents a full and insightful picture of New Zealand social life and individual New Zealanders since 1900, an often dark and violent picture, but viewed in all its historical, social, psychological, and ethical complexity from an inclusive humanist perspective, with a developing command of narrative technique equal to the vision.