Books in the Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction series

Addresses the postmodernist debate over the possibility and relevance of documentary and official histories. This work examines the struggles toward collective memory in a wealth of contemporary women's writing.

In his book Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction since 1960, Marc Chenetier analyzes the developments in recent American fiction, arguing that traditional generic approaches can be misleading.

The novels of Paul Auster have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, an international group of scholars provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings.

"A strongly argued analysis and close reading of Delillo's works... There is much here in the methodology and discussion of postmodern themes and techniques that will have relevance to American studies and cultural studies more widely."-Forum for Modern Language Studies

Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison''s influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers.For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.

This survey of 20th-century arts and ideas attempts to identify underlying epistemological, aesthetic and ethical issues. The author emphasizes how works from diverse media relate to one another and how their relationships affect the contemporary artistic and philosophical climate.

Alice Walker has described the Barbadian American novelist Paule Marshall as "unequaled in intelligence, vision, craft, by anyone of her generation, to put her contributions to our literature modestly." Such praise has echoed through reviews and analyses of Marshall''s work since the 1959 publication of Brown Girl, Brownstones, a novel followed by The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1984), and Daughters (1991).Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom is the first study of Paule Marshall''s work to focus explicitly on her contribution to feminism. It is also the first to identify one of her original contributions to narrative art-a technique of "superimposition" or "double exposure" through which her books have explored topics now at the heart of feminist debate.Centered around the subject of voice and silence, these issues include the interrelation between women''s power and powerlessness, the interpenetration of the political and economic world with the world of the psyche, and the mechanisms through which oppressions on the basis of race, class, and gender operate as mutually shaping forces.