Liberalism and American literature in the Clinton era Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era argues that a new post postmodern aesthetic emerges in the 1990s as a group of American writers including Mary Gaitskill George Saunders Richard Powers Karen Tei Yamashita and others and grapples with the political triumph of free market ideology. The book shows how these writers resist the anti social qualities of this frantic twist to the right (as Gaitskill puts it) while still performing its essential gesture the personalization of otherwise irreducible social antagonisms. Thus we see these writers reinvent political struggles as differences in values and emotions in fictions that explore non antagonistic social forms like families communities and networks. Situating these formally innovative fictions in the context of the controversies that have defined this rightward twist including debates over free trade welfare reform and family values Brooks details how American writers and politicians have reinvented liberalism for the age of pro capitalist consensus Introduction: Try for a moment to feel this The varieties of American neoliberalism The family gone wrong : experimental literature and conservative politics Post political form SUPERNAFTA vs. El Gran Mojado : alternative fictional realitites and the fight for free trade Afterword: then we came to the end.