Beautiful Chaos is the first book to examine contemporary American fiction through the lens of chaos theory. The book focuses on recent works of fiction by John Barth, Michael Crichton, Don DeLillo, Michael Dorris, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Carol Shields, and Robert Stone, all of whom incorporate aspects of chaos theory in one or more of their novels. They accomplish this through their disruption of conventional linear narrative forms and their use of strategic tropes of chaos and order, but also -- and more significantly for an understanding of the interaction of science and fiction -- through their self-conscious embrace of the current rhetoric of chaos theory.

Gordon E. Slethaug is Chairman, Program in American Studies, at the University of Hong Kong, and author of The Play of the Double in Postmodern American Fiction.