bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
H
ammett,
D
ashiell
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Dashiell Hammett is often considered the creator of the hard‐boiled detective story, which featured a distinctive style and a depiction of the detective as strict professional with a private code of ethics that is uncompromisable. He de‐emphasized the intricate puzzle construction of classical detective fictions for stories built on careful character development, distinctive narration, and gritty realism.
H
arrison,
J
im
Authors: Bunge Nancy
Published: August 2017

Jim Harrison believes that the artist should fully explore his or her consciousness; while attempting to meet this standard, Harrison has produced 10 poetry collections, nine novels, five novella trilogies, a memoir, a children's book, and many essays on a variety of subjects, especially food, hunting, fishing, and literature.
I
rving,
J
ohn
Authors: Ings Katharine Nicholson
Published: August 2017

If a novel incorporates into its plot a trained bear or two, cleverly named characters, single mothers, prep school culture, and wrestling, chances are it is written by John Irving. Often compared to Charles Dickens for his storytelling skills, Irving writes darkly comic coming‐of‐age novels set in New England in which boys and men search for meaning in a dysfunctional society.
J
ames,
H
enry
Authors: Ohi Kevin
Published: August 2017

American by birth, educated in the US and Europe, a British citizen at his death, and immersed in not only the American but also the English and European worlds of arts and letters, Henry James is a curiously unassimilable presence in the various traditions – American, Victorian, novelistic, critical, aestheticist, modernist, and queer – to which he both does and does not belong. His early masterpiece
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881) initiates a career that culminates in the three great novels of the turn of the century:
The Ambassadors
(1903),
The Wings of the Dove
(1902), and
The Golden Bowl
(1909). One of the greatest novelists in English, he is, like Johnson, Dryden, and Coleridge, the rare writer who is perhaps equally important for his critical writings: essays such as “The Art of Fiction” and “The Future of the Novel”; a vast range of critical writings on French, English, American, and other writers; and, most importantly, the prefaces to
The New York Edition
form an influential body of literary criticism. He is also one of the masters of the short story and novella (he wrote nearly 100 short stories), and his late (quasi‐)autobiographical texts –
A Small Boy and Others
(1913),
Notes of a Son and Brother
(1914), and
The Middle Years
(1917) (left unfinished at his death, and named after one of his own short stories) – are among the most important instances of the genre in English. In their stylistic and formal complexity, as in some of their central concerns, they look forward to Proust, whose
Recherche
offers one of the few analogous literary experiences. James was also a prolific letter writer, and only a fraction of his more than 10,000 extant letters have been published (though publication is underway). Living most of his life as an expatriate, a late tour of America produced the extraordinary
American Scene
(1907), an unclassifiable work of cultural criticism that offers one of the most fascinating accounts of turn‐ofthe‐century American culture, manners, and architecture.
J
ohnson,
C
harles
Authors: Storhoff Gary
Published: August 2017

Charles Johnson is one of the most innovative, profound, and challenging writers in contemporary America. The author of four novels and three volumes of short stories, Johnson combines Western and Eastern philosophy and religion, revises African American and canonical American literary texts, and fuses magic realism with American history – a creation he calls a “philosophical black fiction.”
J
ones,
G
ayl
Authors: Mix Deborah M.
Published: August 2017

Gayl Jones has written in a variety of genres, but she is best known for her novels, most notably her first,
Corrigedora
(1975). Jones's work insists on the significance of the past – in both its painful and celebratory manifestations – to the present, especially for black women. Textual experimentation, particularly the use of the conventions of African American oral narrative and music, is central to Jones's aesthetic. Her work also reflects her interest in both North and South American history; in a 1982 interview, she discussed her interest in Brazilian history, which informs several of her works, asserting that “the Brazilian experience (purely literary and imaginative since I've never been there) helped to give perspective on the American one” (Rowell 41).
K
erouac,
J
ack
Authors: Theado Matt
Published: August 2017

Jack Kerouac was a leading figure among the Beat Generation writers of the 1950s. Over 30 of Kerouac's works are in print, and he remains one of the most popular American novelists of the twentieth century. His 1957 novel,
On the Road
, inspired numerous young people to spurn conventional middle‐class lives and instead to embark on impulsive adventures and spiritual quests. As a result, Kerouac is sometimes called the daddy of the hippies and the father of the counterculture. He did not relish these titles and wished to be known instead as an innovative writer, yet many of his fans are as interested in his life as in his work; he is the subject of no fewer than 15 biographies. Kerouac saw religious significance in many of the wandering folks he met on the road: hobos, petty criminals, drug addicts, and also, as he wrote in
On the Road
, “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing” (1957, 8). Kerouac is associated today in the popular culture with such people, and with adventurous travel via such nonconventional means as train‐hopping and hitchhiking.
L
arsen,
N
ella
Authors: Bone Martyn
Published: August 2017

In the late 1920s, Nella Larsen emerged as one of the leading literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen's novels
Quicksand
(1928) and
Passing
(1929) are formally sophisticated and psychologically subtle analyses of US racial ideology that also explore issues of class, gender, and sexuality. As the Renaissance waned in the early 1930s, Larsen withdrew from the literary scene and never published another novel. Her slim body of work largely disappeared from American literary history until the 1970s and 1980s, when it was rediscovered by black feminist critics who claimed Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston as literary fore‐mothers for a new wave of African American women writers.
L
ethem,
J
onathan
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

The author of an eclectic array of novels that test the boundaries of genre, Jonathan Lethem combines realism, fantasy, and linguistic play in narratives that range from the story of a crime investigated by a protagonist who suffers from Tourette syndrome to a boy raised in tough circumstances whose dreams of being a superhero survive into adulthood. His native Brooklyn is the setting for many of Lethem's novels, and motherless children are often the protagonists in adventures that alternate between noir and naivety, replete with references to popular culture and urban legend.
M
ajor,
C
larence
Authors: Bunge Nancy
Published: August 2017

Trusting his artistic inclinations has led Clarence Major not only to write in multiple genres but also to paint. He has published nine novels; one collection of short fiction; 11 volumes of poetry; a memoir; two essay collections, one of them about African American literature; two dictionaries of African American slang; two anthologies of African American poetry; and one anthology of African American fiction. He has also produced hundreds of paintings.
M
aso,
C
arole
Authors: Silbergleid Robin
Published: August 2017

Carole Maso is widely known as a feminist experimental writer and postmodernist, though her relationship to the publishing industry has been fraught. Her work foregrounds issues of personal and cultural loss and trauma, particularly the Holocaust and the AIDS pandemic. The author of six works of fiction and three works of non‐fiction, as well as numerous pieces of short fiction and criticism, Maso is a writer's writer who takes language itself as a major subject matter. Born March 9, 1956 in Paterson, New Jersey, Maso attended Vassar College and held a series of odd jobs before publishing
Ghost Dance
in 1986.
M
athews,
H
arry
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Harry Mathews is a remarkably versatile writer in a range of genres – novels, short stories, poetry, essays, translations, and memoir. He has written complex, challenging metafictions, and though he rejects the label, his works have been in the vanguard of American postmodernism.
McC
arthy,
C
ormac
Authors: Mattox Jake
Published: August 2017

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most critically acclaimed and popularly successful writers in modern US fiction over the past 40 years. Most often set within the geographic South and West, his novels usually feature violent plots conveyed through dense prose and intertwined with philosophical and metaphysical investigations. His body of work spans numerous forms and genres, including 10 novels, two plays, and one screenplay, and his works have been adapted to the stage and screen, including
No Country for Old Men
(2005), which won the Academy Award for Best Film in 2007.
M
iller,
H
enry
Authors: Decker James M.
Published: August 2017

Henry Miller, infamous for his use of unvarnished sexuality and seamy portraits of city life, combined a variety of modes – ranging from surrealism and romanticism to the jeremiad and the burlesque – as he investigated his life. His major works banned for three decades, Miller wrote prolifically, and versions of his experiences – both verifiable and fantastic – lie at the core of his narratives. While his sexual imagery often distracts his readers, Miller's importance far surpasses his numerous obscenity trials and extends to both his avant garde narrative style and his rejection of the strangulating values of capitalism.
M
illhauser,
S
teven
Authors: Kasper Catherine
Published: August 2017

Steven Millhauser has been called one of the most original writers to emerge from the 1970s. His novels,
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright
(1972), and
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
(1996), are his most lauded books to date. He is also the author of seven collections of short stories and novellas, and several uncollected stories and articles. One of his short stories was adapted for
The Illusionist
(2006), a major motion picture.
Modern Fiction in Hollywood
Authors: Cerasulo Tom
Published: August 2017

The modern American novel and the Hollywood feature film have historically made for a rocky marriage. Both, at their core, are narrative forms that depict events and characters causally linked to those events, but their respective methods of delivering that narrative to the audience are often colored by different sets of economic, cultural, industrial, and artistic concerns. While the American movie industry has always been attracted to pre‐sold properties – commodities with a familiar set of story elements and a built‐in potential customer base – the process of adapting modern novels to the screen has often posed technical challenges, raised questions of faithfulness to the source material, and stirred up concerns about mass culture's threat to elite culture. In general, the realist novel and genre fiction, modes which place a premium on plot and physical description and encourage audience identification, have been better matches for Hollywood than have modernist texts that chart inner states and seek to intellectually challenge the audience.
Naylor,Gloria
Authors: Whitt Margaret Earley
Published: August 2017

When Alice Walker publishedThe Color Purple(1982), the literary spotlight focused on a writer and novel that won the Pulitzer Prize. That same year Gloria Naylor emerged more quietly withThe Women of Brewster Place(1982) and captured the American Book Award for the Best First Novel. With the addition of her next three novels, Naylor found herself a part of a long African American literary tradition. Her discovery of that tradition came when she read Toni Morrison'sThe Bluest Eye. To date, she has published five novels and one memoir, edited a collection of short stories, and written a variety of pieces for popular magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals. One of her novels has been produced as a television drama, and another novel was staged as a play.
N
orris,
F
rank
Authors: Mickalites Carey
Published: August 2017

Alongside Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris is one of the most important figures in American literary naturalism. Rather neglected today, Norris published six major novels (an important early novel,
Vandover and the Brute
, was published posthumously in 1914), and regularly contributed short stories and impressionistic journalism to such publications as
The Wave
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and
The Occident
. A collection of his critical writing,
The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays
, was published by Doubleday in 1903, shortly after his tragic early death in 1902.
O'Connor,Flannery
Authors: Baldwin Debra Romanick
Published: August 2017

One of the most important voices in American fiction, Flannery O'Connor's art combines jarring intensity, stylistic economy, sardonic humor, intellectual richness, and spiritual depth. Her importance is all the more striking in being based on a relatively small number of fictional works: O'Connor completed but two novels and two collections of short stories before lupus erythematosus cut short her life at the age of 39. Yet she also wrote several essays and lectures, many dozens of reviews, and hundreds of letters, all of whose relation to her fiction remains one of the most interesting critical questions about her art. Alternately categorized as a Southern writer and a Catholic writer, her fiction's aesthetic power and indeterminacy defy easy categorization.
Olsen,Tillie
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: August 2017

The life and work of Tillie Olsen speak to the discontinuities of literary history, an enterprise shaped, as Olsen experienced first‐hand, by patriarchy and political repression, the crushing realities of poverty, and underclass voices silenced by the lack of time or resources to write. Olsen's literary output was slight:Yonnondio: From the Thirties, an unfinished novel published in 1974, but begun in 1933;Tell Me a Riddle(1962), a short‐story collection;Silences(1978), a nonfictional meditation on the obstacles to female authorship; andMother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother(1984), an edited collection of exchanges between women writers and their daughters. Yet Olsen's unsentimental, morally unsparing depictions of the dehumanizing effects of class and gender oppression in America, like her penetrating analysis of the exclusion of women and the poor from literary careers, exerted a powerful influence on second‐wave feminists and scholars of working‐class and Depression‐era literatures in the US. Olsen's contribution to the politicized literary culture of the 1930s has also proven crucial to the important critical revaluation of period over the last decade. Her deft use of modernist technique (influenced by early reading of Stevens, Eliot, Yeats, Dos Passos, and Joyce) in the service of radical, feminist social critique challenges old‐fashioned distinctions between apolitical formalism and committed realism.
P
aley,
G
race
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

Revered as one of the most important and widely taught short story writers of the post‐World War II era, Grace Paley (1922–2007) published four volumes of short stories in her lifetime, as well as several volumes of poetry and non‐fiction; a fervent advocate for the causes of world peace and nuclear disarmament, Paley was equally well known as a political activist beginning with her involvement in the anti‐Vietnam War movement. Paley's stories are meticulously crafted portraits of the middle‐class inhabitants of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Greenwich Village, often focusing on the lives, trials, and conversations of women concerned about families, relationships, and an environment that poses various threats to human well‐being. The ironic tone, dialogism, and metafictional strategies to be found in many of Paley's stories are captured in the title of her first collection of stories,
The Little Disturbances of Man
(1959), as well as in the titles of the stories themselves: “In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All,” a satire on adolescent inventiveness and human evolution; or “The Loudest Voice,” about a young girl with a loud voice who insists on her Jewish identity. Along with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, and Bernard Malamud, Paley is considered as one of the leading architects of the contemporary short story.
Phillips,JayneAnne
Authors: Robertson Sarah
Published: August 2017

Jayne Anne Phillips has drawn international, critical acclaim since her work first appeared in print in the 1970s. In addition to two major collections of short stories, three novels, critical pieces, and reviews, her fiction regularly appears in a wide range of literary magazines. Her contributions toGrantahave partly accounted for the classification of her work as “new realist” or “dirty realist,” situating her alongside writers such as Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason.
P
orter,
K
atherine
A
nne
Authors: Unrue Darlene Harbour
Published: August 2017

Katherine Anne Porter earned distinction among twentieth‐century fiction writers with her lambent prose, classical structure, and penetrating analyses of women and men confronting the modern world. With her personal experience lying at the core of each of her fictional pieces, she consistently addressed the effects of betrayal, alienation, and lovelessness on the human spirit and the power of psychological forces within human behavior. Her relatively small literary yield during her lifetime – 28 short stories and short novels, one long novel, a collection of miscellaneous non‐fiction, and a body of uncollected pieces of non‐fiction – are exemplary in the clarity of both language and vision.
P
owers,
R
ichard
Authors: Dewey Joseph
Published: August 2017

The novels of Richard Powers are dense speculative narratives that set the heartbreaking plotlines of everyday life – stories of obsessive love, dysfunctional families, illness, and death – against a wide‐reaching sensibility that invests such ordinary moments with unsuspected (and compassionate) gravitas. To read the novels as a unit (and each successive novel addresses questions raised by the preceding one) is to recover the sheer density of assumptions we routinely make about the world.
Pynchon,Thomas
Authors: Herman Luc , Krafft John M.
Published: August 2017

On the strength of his first three novels, Thomas Pynchon has become the epitome of American postmodernism. While the label “postmodernist” was not attached to him until the 1980s, it does capture the features central to his work. A historical novelist even when his story is set in or near the present, Pynchon renders the past with such great ingenuity, humor, and self‐awareness that, along with E. L. Doctorow and Kurt Vonnegut, he provides a main source for the concept of what Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographic metafiction.” Often working against conventional characterization, plotting, and perspective, his challenging yet entertaining novels address such topics as capitalism, paranoia, technology, genocide, slavery, and terrorism without succumbing to pedantry or simple caricature.
Queer Modernism
Authors: Morrison Paul
Published: August 2017

Modernism has become sexy again. Only yesterday, it seems, we were eager to relegate the likes of Eliot and Pound to the wrong side of a historical divide, the better to establish our postmodernist credentials. Today, however, the prefix is no longer a condition of our intellectual and ideological well‐being, and we are again laboring to become Joyce's contemporary. In a recent contribution to the “Changing Profession” forum inPMLA, Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz characterize this extraordinary transformation as an “expansion,” one that has metamorphosed even the object of study: where “modernism” once was, “modernisms” now are. According to Mao and Walkowitz, three broad areas of inquiry or interest define the newly pluralized field: (1) “The Transnational Turn,” (2) “Media in an Age of Mass Persuasion,” and (3) “Politics as Itself.” This seems broadly compelling, although there is little here that is either new or unique to the study of modernism. The old modernist studies, for instance, owe a great deal to the work of Hugh Kenner, which includes some important pages on “the mechanic muse,” and one might cite the centrality of Marshall McLuhan, himself a distinguished student of modernism, to any discussion of “media in an age of mass persuasion.” I would be hard‐pressed, moreover, to name any field of literary or cultural studies that has not taken a “transnational turn” of late. It may be, of course, that the new modernist studies are simply keeping faith with the deepest impulses of high modernism itself: “to make it new,” in the familiar paradox, is to recover what is very old. Certainly “expansion” is an impulse intrinsic to modernism, which is among the most imperial and imperializing of literary movements. It remains an open question, for instance, if postcolonial literature has escaped the hold of the Euromodernism that it might logically be expected to reject. The fidelity is not, however, absolute. What is resoundingly absent from Mao and Walkowitz's survey of the new modernist studies is what may well define our modernity: the unprecedented explanatory power attributed to sexuality in general and sexual deviance in particular. The word “sexuality” appears only once in their article, the words “homosexual” and “queer” not at all, and the “Works Cited” is remarkable, at least in part, for what it fails to cite: Scott Herring'sQueering the Underworld(2007); Heather Love'sFeeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History(2007); and Michael Trask'sCruising Modernism(2003), to name but three. Apparently modernism has become sexy again by forgetting about sex.
Roth,Philip
Authors: Royal Derek Parker
Published: August 2017

Philip Roth is one of the most significant, recognized, and prolific novelists of the post‐World War II period. He is the author of over 29 books, and his texts serve as both snapshots and critiques of contemporary culture from World War II to post‐9/11 America. It would be difficult, and certainly foolhardy, to pigeonhole Roth in terms of his style, politics, or narrative predilections. At times he has been read as a social realist in the mold of Henry James, at others a mischievous metafictionalist reminiscent of John Barth. Often he is associated with contemporaries such as John Updike and Bernard Malamud, yet for many readers he bears a stylistic kinship with the more recent generation of Jewish American authors. His novels have served as grist for many popular book clubs, yet he stands as one of the most unsettling, and even one of the most offensive, novelists living today. He has been read as a political radical, an anti‐communist, a stand‐up (or sit‐down) comedian, a misogynist, a liberal apologist, a solipsist, a communitarian, a literary pornographer, a Jewish godfather, and even an anti‐Semite. To call him chameleon‐like would not be an understatement. Yet his fiction is accessible to a general readership, earning him more literary awards than almost any contemporary American author.
S
chuyler,
G
eorge
S
.
Authors: Bain Alexander M.
Published: August 2017

George Samuel Schuyler, journalist and novelist, was one of the most widely read African American periodical writers of the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 25, 1895 (biographer Oscar Williams has noted ambiguities in his birth records); was raised in Syracuse; and lived most of his life in New York City. He worked for, and contributed to, some of the most prominent publications of the century's first half, including
The Messenger, American Mercury
(under the patronage of H. L. Mencken), and
The Crisis
. Between 1924 and 1966 he was a staffer, editor, international correspondent, and columnist at the
Pittsburgh Courier
, one of the major African American weekly newspapers; his many serialized stories appeared there, sometimes under pseudonyms, between 1933 and 1939. He also published two novels. Schuyler's deep ambivalence about racial identity as a basis for making claims about political and social equality, along with his embrace of conservatism after the 1930s, made him controversial throughout his career and led to his eventual disavowal by the
Courier
and the black press in general. His autobiography,
Black and Conservative
(1966), has influenced recent attempts to establish a tradition of African American conservative thought. He died in New York City on August 31, 1977, having spent his final years writing commentary for such rightwing periodicals as the
Manchester Union Leader
.
S
elby,
H
ubert,
Jr.
Authors: Giles James R.
Published: August 2017

Giving voice to urban rage and alienation, Hubert Selby, Jr.'s fiction satirizes conventional assumptions about American culture, and even about the inherent nature of human beings, in extreme and often obscene language. Especially in his first two novels, Selby demands that his reader hear the rage of the urban dispossessed. What results is a mixture of naturalism and artistic primitivism unlike anything that preceded it in American literature. Selby writes out of a deceptively complex aesthetic in which a discourse of outrage masks an underlying compassion. His fiction is committed to violating traditional taboos in language and subject matter.
S
ontag,
S
usan
Authors: Sayres Sohnya
Published: August 2017

Born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, Susan Sontag spent her childhood in Arizona. Avid and intense, she flew through her high school years in Los Angeles, entering college at age 15 and transferring to the University of Chicago at age 16. A year later she met and married sociologist Philip Rieff, with whom she had a son, David. The couple moved east, where Sontag pursued graduate degrees in philosophy, literature, and religion at Harvard, then at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Subsequently, she divorced Rieff and began her career as an independent writer, dividing her time between Europe and New York. By her early thirties, she established herself as an interpreter of culture at ease with erudition while discussing an array of contemporary topics. By the 1970s, she began to win prestigious awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship (1990–5); her notable courage in the public arena included creating theater for the besieged city of Sarajevo (1993–6). She succumbed to leukemia, an outcome of treatments for cancer that she contracted at 42, just shy of her 72nd birthday.
Spiegelman, Art
Authors: Chute Hillary L.
Published: August 2017

Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist, permanently expanded the categoryof “literature” and public conceptions of comics with his two‐volume
Maus: A Survivor's Tale
(1986, 1991), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. A 13‐year project in which Spiegelman recorded his father Vladek's testimony of surviving the Holocaust,
Maus
demonstrated that the medium of comics is capable of engendering serious, sophisticated, and intricate work. Spiegelman has altered the critical landscape of contemporary literature by focusing attention on the relationship between form, memory, and history.
S
tein,
G
ertrude
Authors: Moses Omri
Published: August 2017

Gertrude Stein, once considered a minor writer because of her extreme and rather forbidding experimental impulses, is now often ranked among the earliest and most important literary modernists. Her fictional writing style is notable for its use of repetition, non‐standard grammar and punctuation, narrative digressions and disjunctiveness, unsettling narrative tone and authority, and other formal features meant to challenge expectations about the novel as a form, to explore the nature of existential time, and to expand the repertoire of intellectual and emotional effects produced in readers. As a rule, she focuses on humdrum events, including family power struggles and amorous relationships in a domestic context. She also explores how individuals coincide with or deviate from fixed social and racial types. She took her cues from the experimental visual arts – most notably from cubism – as well as from realist and naturalist writers such as Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, in turn influencing numerous younger writers whom she befriended, such as Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Thornton Wilder. She has impacted and inspired feminist critics and writers, avant garde poets, and artists of the present moment, including members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. Her allusions in her work to same‐sex desires and her nearpublic lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas have also been a source of interest to theorists of sexuality.
Tan,Amy
Authors: Shu Yuan
Published: August 2017

Amy Tan enjoys great popularity as a Chinese American fiction writer. Beginning with the success of her first novel,The Joy Luck Club(1989), Tan has sought to represent Chinese American women's life experiences across cultural spaces and historical periods and to explore popular themes such as mother‐daughter relationships, generational conflicts, matrilineal inheritance, biculturalism, as well as reconnection with ethnic heritage in American contexts. She has so far produced five novels, two juvenile novels, and one book collection of essays.
Television and Fiction
Authors: Oxoby Marc C.
Published: August 2017

Television was initially dismissed by many as a “faddish gimmick,” but it quickly became clear that this was not so. TV was here to stay. Still, in the medium's early years, the literary world's reaction remained limited, perhaps because it had already dealt with the perceived similar threat of film. Writers reacted swiftly to the advent of cinema in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas the movie industry feared television would drain its audience, writers regarded this as merely more of the same. Ultimately, however, television would prove to have a unique identity, bringing with it new aesthetics and issues to which writers would eventually have to respond. Additionally, the popularization of TV, with its own popular narrative component, seen by some as cutting into the market for prose fiction even further than film had, prompted writers and others in the publishing industry to rethink their craft, creatively and commercially.
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
Authors: Ferrara Mark S.
Published: August 2017

Although the genre of utopian literature in the West begins with Plato's
The Republic
(c.375–70 BC), fictional depictions of better places have grown rapidly since the publication of Thomas More's
Utopia
(1516). American literary utopias of the twentieth century respond to modernity in surprising ways by taking a diversity of forms (including one populated exclusively by women who reproduce asexually and another that employs behavioral engineering to improve social cohesion). From the nineteenth century onward, American literary depictions of dystopian worlds reflect a century of war and increasing technological and governmental intrusions into social life.
Vizenor,Gerald
Authors: Carson Benjamin D.
Published: August 2017

Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) is one of the most prolific Native American novelists, poets, essayists, and scholars working today, and his work has had a profound influence on Native American literature and scholarship. Author and editor of over 30 works, Vizenor is a unique and at times controversial figure in the world of Native American discourse.
W
allace,
D
avid
F
oster
Authors: Burn Stephen J.
Published: August 2017

If American literature in the 1980s was dominated by minimalist writers, whose clipped prose and skeletal plots were built upon the belief that less is more, then the publication in 1987 of David Foster Wallace's first novel,
The Broom of the System
, indicated a reaction against the dominant aesthetic, recalling instead the deliberately excessive fictions of Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo. Like works by Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann – who published first novels in the same decade – Wallace's book both overlapped with, and subtly diverged from, the practice of older postmodernists. By mixing multiple perspectives and different media, drawing attention to its intertextual allusions and self‐reflexive strategies, Wallace's novel demonstrated in a decade of literary downsizing that sometimes more really was more.
Warren,RobertPenn
Authors: Bradley Patricia L.
Published: August 2017

Robert Penn Warren's voice and reputation dominated twentieth‐century writing across diverse forms and genres, including poetry, fiction, biography, pedagogy, drama, memoir, literary criticism, and social commentary. Although the bulk of Warren's literary legacy is almost six decades of poetic output, especially the poetry of his later life, the yeomanry of his fiction also reveals a Southerner struggling with dichotomous aspects of his twentieth‐century milieu: high and low culture, mythic past and uncertain present, place‐boundedness and expatriate yearnings homeward.
W
est,
P
aul
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Paul West is one of the most prolific and important voices to emerge in post‐World War II fiction. His career spans a variety of fictional experiments, but beginning in the early 1980s he has consistently produced challenging postmodern historiographic novels. In addition to 23 novels and a volume of short stories, he has nine memoirs, seven works of criticism, and three collections of poetry.
W
hitehead,
C
olson
Authors: Liggins Saundra
Published: August 2017

Colson Whitehead contributes an innovative voice not just to the field of African American literature, but also to American literature in general. He offers a vision of the African American and American experiences that reflects the modern preoccupations with technology and identity, using unconventional plots, settings, and themes to construct narratives that challenge the reader's notions of the relationship between the past and future. Despite the fact that Whitehead's desire to become a writer stemmed from his reading a novel by the horror author Stephen King when Whitehead was young, Colson Whitehead is most notably an heir to the tradition of African American literature that critiques the nature of race relations in the United States. While White‐head's name fits naturally among such African American authors as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, he is also in the same company as such contemporary white authors as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, writers who offer stinging commentaries on contemporary American culture. In addition to contributing essays and reviews to the
New York Times Book Review, Granta
, and
Harper s
, Colson Whitehead has published three novels and one work of non‐fiction. He also wrote the introduction to
Get Your War On
by David Rees, a collection of cartoons criticizing the United States war on terrorism that was published in 2002.
W
right,
S
tephen
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Stephen Wright is an experimental writer dedicated to challenging fictional complacencies and traditions in postmodern fictions that examine American culture in all its extravagances. His subjects range among the Vietnam War, interstellar aliens, middle‐class boredom, and the American Civil War, each distinguished by extraordinary stylistic virtuosity.
Y
ezierska,
A
nzia
Authors: Simpson Tyrone
Published: August 2017

We can find the making of Anzia Yezierska as a literary luminary in the publication history of her first short story, “The Free Vacation House” (1915). It is the tale of a poor immigrant mother and family who gain a paid retreat to the country, only to find themselves fettered to the effete lodge rules of the bourgeois woman who hosts them. The story emerged from a painstaking collaboration between the writer and her older sister, Annie, who at the time of the story's conception was a mother of five children and the former victim of such condescending hospitality. Anzia coached her sibling into recalling her emotional response to the insulting treatment and asked her advice about how to represent the immigrant tongue on paper. Born from their partnership were the proletarian realism and ghetto dialect that gave Yezierska's fiction its distinct accent, as well as the recurring themes of her sustained, albeit mercurial literary career: the vexations of married life and parenting, the uncertain fruits of assimilation, the spectacular material differences between the lives of the moneyed and those of the poor, the disappointments that attend the pursuit of beauty, the alienations forged by polite or malicious xenophobia, and the myriad sexisms that the ensuing jazz age would seek to remit. Using the raw materials of her own life and that of other Gotham‐bound Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, Yezierska deployed narrative to decipher the riddle of (a newcomer's) pure desire.
A
ntoni,
R
obert
Authors: Smith Eric D.
Published: August 2017

As Edouard Glissant observes, an abiding preoccupation of West Indian writers is the “longing for the ideal of history” (79) – a desire as impossible as it is indispensible. The novels of Robert Antoni vividly exemplify this call for a new historical consciousness. Incorporating an encyclopedic breadth of genres and discourses and exploring the possibilities of mythology, folklore, science, history, and both canonical and postcolonial literary traditions, his fiction enacts Glissant's “prophetic vision of the past” (64), a creative reconstitution of a fragmentary Trinidadian history that figures, in the very act of its necessary failure, a Caribbean social reality to come.
A
slam,
N
adeem
Authors: Khurshid Khurram N.
Published: August 2017

A novelist of tragic vision, the Pakistan‐born British novelist Nadeem Aslam writes narratives that confront violence, bigotry, and oppression in the contemporary world. While such forces are opposed by love and compassion in his work, the latter prove inadequate in the face of violent turmoil and are regularly thwarted by moribund social and religious conventions.
B
aratham,
G
opal
Authors: Leong Liew‐Geok
Published: August 2017

Gopal Baratham was one of Singapore's most provocative writers in English. His frank, often controversial treatment of religion, sexual relations, interethnic relationships, and the relations between colonist and colonized, victor and vanquished, and the individual and the state gives his fiction narrative breadth, while his pursuit of the ambiguities and ambivalences of human behavior imbues it with a realistic and skeptical dimension.
B
rand,
D
ionne
Authors: Smyth Heather
Published: August 2017

Dionne Brand comes to fiction through poetry, and her fiction demonstrates a poet's tautness of image and interrogation of language. She also comes to writing through a commitment to social justice, and the themes of her poetry and prose – the precarious lives of women and racialized minorities in capitalist systems, the haunting of traumas like the Middle Passage, the rootlessness of the diaspora, and the hard‐won joy of finding compatriots – have helped her work define Caribbean and Canadian writing.
B
rink,
A
ndré
Authors: Wenzel Marita
Published: August 2017

The prolific South African author André Brink has published 25 novels, 14 plays, six travel journals, and several short stories. His knowledge of European languages, especially French, has inspired him to translate a variety of literary works into Afrikaans, and he has promoted Afrikaans literature by translating prominent authors into English and publishing most of his own novels in both languages simultaneously. An intense interest in South African society and politics remains the mainstay of his oeuvre.
B
rodber,
E
rna
Authors: Adams Michelene
Published: August 2017

Jamaican Erna Brodber has published extensively in her fields of training – sociology and history – but she also produces some of the most original fiction in the West Indian region. She has published four critically acclaimed novels:
Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home
(1980),
Myal
(1988),
Louisiana
(1994), and
The Rainmaker's Mistake
(2007). Her books have garnered awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, which she received in 1989 for
Myal
. Brodber's formally inventive texts are thematically concerned with women's social and psychological development, but the principal focus is the history of Caribbean blacks, how that history has shaped their present, and how its negative impact might be diminished. Although the Middle Passage and its aftermath are very real fragments of the past for her, her vision extends beyond the potentially imprisoning subjects of slavery and racism. She looks further, into the ancestral past, and taps into resources that have the potential to expand the territory of history and to foster more composite West Indian selves. Her fiction has been associated with that of the visionary and influential writers Wilson Harris and Kamau Brathwaite.
Censorship and Fiction
Authors: Heawood Jonathan
Published: August 2017

The history of censorship in the twentieth century is bound up with the development of free speech as a human right. Before the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, free speech in the British Empire was merely a residual right, consisting primarily of whatever was not expressly forbidden in English law. While censorship was not a feature of the common law, colonial administrations could draw upon a range of powers to penalize authors whose writing they deemed blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, or seditious. As the Empire gave way to independence for many states in the second half of the twentieth century, their citizens acquired the right to freedom of speech, as set out in international conventions and domestic constitutions. However, free speech has proved difficult to define and to uphold, and many states have continued to silence authors with impunity. Overt state censorship – whereby books are submitted for approval before their publication – is not the only political means by which authorial freedom is constrained. As the twentieth century drew to a close, relativist and religious critiques of the human rights framework coincided with the rise of the Internet to globalize new forms of suppression.
C
handra,
V
ikram
Authors: Alexandru Maria‐Sabina Draga
Published: August 2017

Vikram Chandra belongs to the younger generation of contemporary non‐resident Indian authors writing in English. His fiction combines the South Asian storytelling tradition with a different kind of dynamic textuality inspired by the flexible patterns of the Internet. A postmodern author influenced by John Barth and Donald Barthelme, and supported through graduate school by work as a computer programmer, Chandra writes fiction in which oral storytelling and computing, history, and invention come together.
The City in Fiction
Authors: Ranasinha Ruvani
Published: August 2017

Twentieth‐century fictional representations of the city from writers of the postcolonial world both appropriate and modify the urban themes of Euro‐American literature, where the city is often defined in relation to the country. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, the archetypal rural/urban divide is sometimes mapped onto an international division between the colonial periphery and the metropolitan center. If V. S. Naipaul's portrayal of Port of Spain, Trinidad, as a colonial backwater inA House for Mr. Biswas(1961) reinforces these paradigms, then his depiction of the constrained lives of male immigrants in decaying London inThe Mimic Men(1967) destabilizes them. Salman Rushdie's heightened evocation of Bombay's linguistic verve, vitality, and metropolitan excitement inMidnight's Children(1981) presents a further challenge. Urban representations from the “Third World” often underscore the uneven development of urban and rural areas, as in “the city and the veld” writings of Doris Lessing from Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In Australian literature, Patrick White's novels interrogate the polarized relationship between the city and the outback. White's indictment of urban culture depicts Sydney and suburbia as sites of confusion and danger; his novelThe Vivisector(1970) laments Sydney's evolution from village to city within a lifetime. David Malouf'sJohnno(1975) and New Zealander Ian Wedde'sSymmes Hole(1986) express disaffection for the modern, uniform metropolis in terms of a resistance to fragmentation.
C
oetzee,
J. M.
Authors: Kelly Michelle
Published: August 2017

Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is among the most widely celebrated and studied novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. He was born in South Africa, educated there and in the United States, and recently became a citizen of Australia, but Coetzee's reach as a writer is global, even if he is still most closely identified with his native South Africa.
Critical Theory and Fiction
Authors: Huddart David
Published: August 2017

The wave of decolonization in the two decades following 1945 ultimately led to fundamental intellectual shifts. The thinkers commonly associated with critical theory (often just
theory)
were reacting to specific histories like that of decolonization: for example, Jean‐François Lyotard, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida were all influenced by the Algerian War of Independence. Assumptions common to the European colonial mindset came under historical and intellectual pressure, and theory was one result. These influences are sometimes difficult to pinpoint: they are often indirect, and are felt in many different intellectual fields. Indeed, theory is not really a theory
of
something, but more a general critical attitude to assumptions about identity and meaning. Accordingly, the specific questions theory asks about
fiction
are part of a continuum of questioning of the cultural meanings surrounding us. Theory is therefore fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing on fields like anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. This diversity of influences means that it is not possible to cover all theory's methods; however, a representative sample gives a sense of the questions theory asks, and indicates its influence on the study of fiction.
D
esani,
G. V.
Authors: Singh Amardeep
Published: August 2017

Govind Vishnoodas Desani, who published as G. V. Desani, is best known as the author of a highly unusual novel,
All about H. Hatterr
(1948), written at the tail end of British colonialism in India. While it was never a commercial success, the novel was appreciated by Western critics such as T. S. Eliot as an example of a virtuosic experimental modernist text by an Indian author.
EastAfrican Fiction
Authors: Mwangi Evan
Published: August 2017

Critics and historians of African literature use the term “East Africa” heuristically to describe a diverse geopolitical entity that covers Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Somalia, and sometimes Ethiopia and Eritrea. Fiction from this area is as diverse as the demographic and linguistic characteristics of each county, encompassing a wide range of aesthetic and political backgrounds. Published both by small local firms and by multinational presses at home and abroad, the fiction appears not only in English but also in indigenous languages, especially Kiswahili and Amharic. Even the English‐language fiction often assumes an audience conversant with local languages, with characters and narrators implicitly speaking in a particular local language that has been “translated” into English.