Books in the New American Canon series

Who writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that's hardly the only change. Today's war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre's conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics-- authorship, content, and form--of the American war fiction genre.

Presents a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Reverse colonization narratives ask Western audiences to imagine what it's like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. David Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative, reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking.

William Gibson is frequently described as one of the most influential writers of the past few decades, yet his body of work has only been studied partially and without full recognition of its implications for literature and culture beyond science fiction. It is high time for a book that explores the wide-ranging impact of Gibson's fiction.

Explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the lens of place, showing how authors like William Least Heat-Moon, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko represent and reimagine real places in the world and the human-environment relationships therein.

Offers a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, Alexandra Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience.

Argues that careful attention to a particular strain of twentieth-century lyric poetry yields a counter-history of American global power. The period that Phillis covers - from Ezra Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930 to Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire in 2012 - roughly matches the ascent and decline of the American empire.

Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between US and Soviet forces.

From baby boomers to millennials, attending a big music festival has basically become a cultural rite of passage in America. In Half a Million Strong, music writer and scholar Gina Arnold explores the history of large music festivals in America and examines their impact on American culture.

After the second World War, ""technology"" came to signify both the anxieties of possible annihilation in a changing world and the exhilaration of accelerating cultural change. This book examines how some of the most well-known writers of the era described the tensions between technical, literary, and media cultures at the dawn of the Digital Age.

We live in a world of talk. Yet Race Sounds argues that we need to listen more - not just hear things, but actively listen - particularly in relation to how we engage race, gender, and class differences. Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists imagine listening.

Roots rock, Americana, alt country: what are they and why do they matter? Americans have been trying to answer these questions for as long as the music bearing these labels has existed. In It's Just the Normal Noises, Timothy Gray examines a wide array of writing about roots music from the 1960s to the 2000s.