Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader's understanding of key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of key terms and details of archives
and internet sites are also provided, making each volume a comprehensive critical guide.
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley
Contemporary American Fiction
David Brauner
This is an accessible, lucid and incisive study that will prove indispensable to students and scholars of contemporary American fiction. Featuring a wide range of authors - from canonical figures such as Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Annie Proulx, to increasingly influential writers such as Jeffrey Eugenides, Gish Jen and Richard Powers - the book combines detailed readings of key texts with informative discussions of their historical, social and cultural contexts.
There are chapters focusing on formal characteristics (the use of irony and paradox in novels by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Bret Easton Ellis, and the generic properties of the texts and films of Cold Mountain, Brokeback Mountain and No Country for Old Men) and on thematic concerns (the representation of gender and sexuality in novels by Jane Smiley, Carol Shields and Jeffrey Eugenides, and of ethnicity, race and hybridity in fiction by Gish Jen, Philip Roth and Richard Powers). Running through all these chapters is an interrogation of all three elements making up the phrase c'ontemporary American fiction'.
David Brauner is Reader in English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) and Philip Roth (Manchester University Press, 2007).

David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of two monographs - Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001) and Philip Roth (Manchester University Press, 2007) - and has also published widely on twentieth-century Jewish literature, contemporary American fiction and post-war novelizations of biblical narratives.

Introduction; Chapter 1 'The space reserved for irony': Irony and Paradox in Don DeLillo's White Noise, Paul Auster's City of Glass and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho; Chapter 2 Silence, Secrecy and Sexuality: 'Alternate Histories' in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries and Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex; Chapter 3 'Nes and Yo': Race, Ethnicity and Hybridity in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land, Philip Roth's The Human Stain and Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing; Chapter 4 Contemporary American Fiction Goes to Hollywood: Genre in the Texts and Films of Cold Mountain, Brokeback Mountain and No Country for Old Men; Conclusion