Details

Subject(s)

• American fiction—20th century—History and criticism [Browse]
• Literature and society—United States—History—20th century [Browse]
• Modernism (Literature)—United States [Browse]
• Liberalism in literature [Browse]

Series

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture [More in this series]

Summary note

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 - grapples with the political triumph of free-market ideology. The book shows how these writers resist the anti-social qualities of this frantic right-wing shift 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 shift - 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.

Notes

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 20 Jun 2022).

ISBN

9781009019040 (ebook)

Statement on language in description

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