Fredman makes the original argument that some of the most innovative works of poetry and art in the postwar period (1945-1970) engaged in a "contextual practice," a term that refers both to a way of making art characterized by assemblage and to a new relationship between art and life, an "erotic poetics."

Stephen Fredman is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (1983, 1990), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.