MAF
EN53308A: Modern American Fiction
A Reading List
By topic
General
Alan Bilton, An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh, 2002)
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1984)
Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Rutland, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: a History of American Literature (London: Routledge, 1991)
David Brauner, Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010)
Marc Chenetier, Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960 (Penn State, 1996)
John N.Duvall ed, The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945 (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming December 2011)
Julia Eichelberger, Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in the novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999)
Kathryn Hume, American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960 (Illinois, 2002)
Kenneth Millard, Contemporary American Fiction (OUP, 2000) (chapters on Auster, DeLillo, Erdich, McCarthy, Morrison, O’Brien, Phillips and Proulx)
Patrick O’Donnell, The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History, (London: Penguin 2010)
Simon Schama, The American Future: A History from the Founding Fathers to Barack Obama, (London: Vintage, 2009)
Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (London: Virago, 2009)
Postmodernism
Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism: Themes & Strategies in Postmodernist British & American Fiction (Edward Arnold, 1990)
Peter Brooker, New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism and the New Modern (Longman, 1996)
Josh Cohen, Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto, 1998)
Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millenium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)
Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
Deborah Madsen, Allegory in America: from Puritanism to Postmodernism (Macmillan, 1996)
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (Methuen, 1987)
Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley and London: University California Press, 1992)
Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology & American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Cornell, 1995)
Black Writing
Henry Louis Gates (ed.), Black Literature and Literary Theory (Routledge, 1990)
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (OUP, 1988).
Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Redmond, Houston A. Baker, Jr. (eds.), Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Chicago, 1991)
Laura Anne Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (OUP, 1994)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (New York, Vintage, 1993)
Gender and Sexuality
Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, (eds.), The Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990)
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (Routledge,1993)
Joseph Bristow, Sexuality, (Routledge, 1997)
Thomas Foster (ed.), The Gay 90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies (New York UP, 1997)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Penguin, 1978)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London, Routledge, 1994)
Trauma and memory
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
L. Hanley, Writing War: Fiction, Gender and Memory (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991)
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2000)
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, (London: Routledge, 2008)
Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: EUP, 2004)
By Author
Flannery O’Connor
Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Gretlund, Jan Nordby and Karl-Heinz Westarp, ed., Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006_
James A Grimshaw Jr., The Flannery O’Connor Companion, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1981)
Michael Kreyling, New Essays on Wise Blood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Ralph Ellison
George Cotkin, Existential America, (2003).
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, pref. by Saul Bellow, ed. by J. Callahan, (1995).
Richard Kostelanetz, Politics in the African American Novel, (1991).
New Essays on Invisible Man, ed. by R. O’Meally, (1988).
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A reader’s guide to Essential Criticism, ed. by C. Clegg (2000)
Vladimir Nabokov, ed by W. Connolly, (2005).
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. by F. Bowers, intro. By J. Updike, (1980).
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed. by E. Pifer, (2002).
Saul Bellow
James Atlas, Bellow (London: Faber, 2001)
Harold Bloom, ed., Saul Bellow: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea, 1986)
Malcolm Bradbury, Saul Bellow: Contemporary Writers (London and New York: Methuen, 1982)
Jeanne Braham, A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow’s Fiction (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984)
Earl Rovit, Saul Bellow (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota , 1967)
Tony Tanner Saul Bellow (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1965)
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut (Routledge, 1990)
Kevin A. Boon ed., At Millennium's End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut (SUNY, 2001)
Kurt Vonnegut, Lee Stringer, Daniel Simon, Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing (Washington Square, 2000)
Harold Bloom ed., Kurt Vonnegut: Modern Critical Views (Chelsea House, 2000)
Thomas F. Marvin, Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion (Greenwood, 2002)
Joan Didion
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, (1968).
Joyce Carol Oates
Gavin Cologne-Brooks, Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Baton-Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005)
Conversations with Contemporary American Writers: Saul Bellow, I.B. Singer, Joyce Carol Oates (Rodopi, 1985)
Brenda O Daley, Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Jackosn: University Press of Mississippi, 1996)
Toni Morrison
Nellie Y. McKay ed., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (G.K. Hall, 1988)
Carl Plasa & Betty J. Ring eds., The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Benn to Toni Morrison (Routledge, 1994)
Trudier Harris, Fiction & Folklore: the Novels of Toni Morrison (Tennessee, 1993)
Marc Cameron Reyes-Conner ed., The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison (Mississippi, 2000)
Linden Peach ed., Toni Morrison (Palgrave, 1998)
Henry Louis Gates & K.A. Appiah eds., Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past & Present (Amistad, 1993)
Barbara Hill Rigney, The Voices of Toni Morrison (Ohio, 1994)
Jill Matus, Toni Morrison (Manchester, 2000)
Louise Erdrich
Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton, A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich (University of Missouri, 1999)
Lauren Stokey, Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion (Greenwood Press, 1999)
E. Annie Proulx
Alex Hunt ed., The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism (Lanham, MD; Plymouth: Lexington Books, c.2008)
Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz, Regionalism and the humanities (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)
Karen L. Rood, Understanding Annie Proulx (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001)
Jim Stacy ed., Reading Brokeback Mountain (Jefferson, NC: Macfarland and Company, 2007)
Jayne Anne Phillips and Tim O’Brien
Robert Baughmann ed., American Writers of the Vietnam War (Gale, 1991)
M.A. Herberle, A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2001)
Kenneth Millard, Contemporary American Fiction (OUP, 2000)
Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Blackwell, 2001)
Phillip Roth
Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson eds., Reading Philip Roth (Macmillan, 1988)
Murray Baumgarten, Understanding Philip Roth (South Carolina, 1990)
Sanford Pinsker ed. Critical essays on Philip Roth (G.K. Hall, 1982)
Deborah Shostak, Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives (South Carolina, 2004)
Mark Schechne, ‘Up Society’s Ass, Copper’: Rereading Philip Roth (Wisconsin, 2003)
Jewish-American Fiction
Stephen Wade, Jewish-American Writing Since 1945 (Edinburgh, 1999)
Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (CUP, 1998)
David Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave, 2001)
Cormac McCarthy
Alan Bilton, An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh, 2002)
E.T. Arnold and D. C. Luce eds, New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Mississippi, 1999)
Rick Wallach ed., Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy (Manchester, 2001)
Crime and Science Fiction
Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Southern Illinois, 1984)
Stephen Knight, Form & Ideology in Crime Fiction (Indiana, 1981)
T.J. Binyon, ‘Murder Will Out’: the Detective in Fiction (OUP, 1989)
Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art & Ideology in Detective Fiction (Yale, 1981)
Brian Docherty, American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (London, 1988)
David Seed, American Science Fiction & the Cold War (Edinburgh, 1999)
Scott Bukatman Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke, 1993)
Carl Howard Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Wesleyan, 2000)
Paul Auster
Dennis Barone (ed.), Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (Pennsylvania, 1995)
Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews (Faber, 2000)
Aliki Varvogli, World That Is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction (Liverpool, 2002)
Don DeLillo
Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (Twayne, 1993)
Frank Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo (Duke, 1991)
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (Routledge, 2005)
Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don Delillo's Dialogue With Culture (Penn State, 2000)
Online resources
The internet offers a wealth of additional materials too numerous and ever-evolving to be listed here. However, the websites below have been tried and tested, and continue to offer excellent, academic-oriented support:
http://baas.ac.uk, British Association for American Studies website, has some excellent resources. The ‘BAAS Pamphlet’ series under the ‘Resources’ link offers free, downloadable guides to key American topics and concepts (e.g. the American Dream, Watergate, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, immigrant experiences) as well as some studies of relevant writers and genres (e.g. American crime fiction, Native American writing)
http://www.litencyc.com, home portal for The Literary Encyclopedia, a useful starting point for examining common literary terms. Also has an extensive range of introductory essays on a variety of authors and texts, including those pertaining to American literature, with a guide for further reading.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/, Norton Anthology of American Literature Student website, which has a range of exercises on authors and topics (‘topic clusters’), as well as some very useful timelines to help students place works in the historical context – a little basic, but handy for the student new to American literature as a whole.
A Reading List
By topic
General
Alan Bilton, An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh, 2002)
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern American Novel (Oxford: OUP, 1984)
Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Rutland, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: a History of American Literature (London: Routledge, 1991)
David Brauner, Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010)
Marc Chenetier, Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960 (Penn State, 1996)
John N.Duvall ed, The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945 (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming December 2011)
Julia Eichelberger, Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in the novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999)
Kathryn Hume, American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960 (Illinois, 2002)
Kenneth Millard, Contemporary American Fiction (OUP, 2000) (chapters on Auster, DeLillo, Erdich, McCarthy, Morrison, O’Brien, Phillips and Proulx)
Patrick O’Donnell, The American Novel Now: Reading Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty: A New History, (London: Penguin 2010)
Simon Schama, The American Future: A History from the Founding Fathers to Barack Obama, (London: Vintage, 2009)
Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (London: Virago, 2009)
Postmodernism
Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism: Themes & Strategies in Postmodernist British & American Fiction (Edward Arnold, 1990)
Peter Brooker, New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism and the New Modern (Longman, 1996)
Josh Cohen, Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto, 1998)
Jeremy Green, Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millenium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)
Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
Deborah Madsen, Allegory in America: from Puritanism to Postmodernism (Macmillan, 1996)
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (Methuen, 1987)
Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley and London: University California Press, 1992)
Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology & American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Cornell, 1995)
Black Writing
Henry Louis Gates (ed.), Black Literature and Literary Theory (Routledge, 1990)
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (OUP, 1988).
Elizabeth Alexander, Patricia Redmond, Houston A. Baker, Jr. (eds.), Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Chicago, 1991)
Laura Anne Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (OUP, 1994)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (New York, Vintage, 1993)
Gender and Sexuality
Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin, (eds.), The Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader (Routledge, 1993)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990)
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (Routledge,1993)
Joseph Bristow, Sexuality, (Routledge, 1997)
Thomas Foster (ed.), The Gay 90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies (New York UP, 1997)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Penguin, 1978)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London, Routledge, 1994)
Trauma and memory
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
L. Hanley, Writing War: Fiction, Gender and Memory (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991)
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2000)
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, (London: Routledge, 2008)
Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: EUP, 2004)
By Author
Flannery O’Connor
Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Gretlund, Jan Nordby and Karl-Heinz Westarp, ed., Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006_
James A Grimshaw Jr., The Flannery O’Connor Companion, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1981)
Michael Kreyling, New Essays on Wise Blood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Ralph Ellison
George Cotkin, Existential America, (2003).
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, pref. by Saul Bellow, ed. by J. Callahan, (1995).
Richard Kostelanetz, Politics in the African American Novel, (1991).
New Essays on Invisible Man, ed. by R. O’Meally, (1988).
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A reader’s guide to Essential Criticism, ed. by C. Clegg (2000)
Vladimir Nabokov, ed by W. Connolly, (2005).
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. by F. Bowers, intro. By J. Updike, (1980).
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed. by E. Pifer, (2002).
Saul Bellow
James Atlas, Bellow (London: Faber, 2001)
Harold Bloom, ed., Saul Bellow: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea, 1986)
Malcolm Bradbury, Saul Bellow: Contemporary Writers (London and New York: Methuen, 1982)
Jeanne Braham, A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow’s Fiction (Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984)
Earl Rovit, Saul Bellow (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota , 1967)
Tony Tanner Saul Bellow (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1965)
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Jerome Klinkowitz, Kurt Vonnegut (Routledge, 1990)
Kevin A. Boon ed., At Millennium's End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut (SUNY, 2001)
Kurt Vonnegut, Lee Stringer, Daniel Simon, Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing (Washington Square, 2000)
Harold Bloom ed., Kurt Vonnegut: Modern Critical Views (Chelsea House, 2000)
Thomas F. Marvin, Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion (Greenwood, 2002)
Joan Didion
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, (1968).
Joyce Carol Oates
Gavin Cologne-Brooks, Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Baton-Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005)
Conversations with Contemporary American Writers: Saul Bellow, I.B. Singer, Joyce Carol Oates (Rodopi, 1985)
Brenda O Daley, Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Jackosn: University Press of Mississippi, 1996)
Toni Morrison
Nellie Y. McKay ed., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (G.K. Hall, 1988)
Carl Plasa & Betty J. Ring eds., The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Benn to Toni Morrison (Routledge, 1994)
Trudier Harris, Fiction & Folklore: the Novels of Toni Morrison (Tennessee, 1993)
Marc Cameron Reyes-Conner ed., The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison (Mississippi, 2000)
Linden Peach ed., Toni Morrison (Palgrave, 1998)
Henry Louis Gates & K.A. Appiah eds., Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past & Present (Amistad, 1993)
Barbara Hill Rigney, The Voices of Toni Morrison (Ohio, 1994)
Jill Matus, Toni Morrison (Manchester, 2000)
Louise Erdrich
Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton, A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich (University of Missouri, 1999)
Lauren Stokey, Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion (Greenwood Press, 1999)
E. Annie Proulx
Alex Hunt ed., The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism (Lanham, MD; Plymouth: Lexington Books, c.2008)
Timothy R. Mahoney and Wendy J. Katz, Regionalism and the humanities (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)
Karen L. Rood, Understanding Annie Proulx (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001)
Jim Stacy ed., Reading Brokeback Mountain (Jefferson, NC: Macfarland and Company, 2007)
Jayne Anne Phillips and Tim O’Brien
Robert Baughmann ed., American Writers of the Vietnam War (Gale, 1991)
M.A. Herberle, A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2001)
Kenneth Millard, Contemporary American Fiction (OUP, 2000)
Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Blackwell, 2001)
Phillip Roth
Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson eds., Reading Philip Roth (Macmillan, 1988)
Murray Baumgarten, Understanding Philip Roth (South Carolina, 1990)
Sanford Pinsker ed. Critical essays on Philip Roth (G.K. Hall, 1982)
Deborah Shostak, Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives (South Carolina, 2004)
Mark Schechne, ‘Up Society’s Ass, Copper’: Rereading Philip Roth (Wisconsin, 2003)
Jewish-American Fiction
Stephen Wade, Jewish-American Writing Since 1945 (Edinburgh, 1999)
Emily Miller Budick, Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation (CUP, 1998)
David Brauner, Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave, 2001)
Cormac McCarthy
Alan Bilton, An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh, 2002)
E.T. Arnold and D. C. Luce eds, New Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Mississippi, 1999)
Rick Wallach ed., Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy (Manchester, 2001)
Crime and Science Fiction
Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Southern Illinois, 1984)
Stephen Knight, Form & Ideology in Crime Fiction (Indiana, 1981)
T.J. Binyon, ‘Murder Will Out’: the Detective in Fiction (OUP, 1989)
Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art & Ideology in Detective Fiction (Yale, 1981)
Brian Docherty, American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre (London, 1988)
David Seed, American Science Fiction & the Cold War (Edinburgh, 1999)
Scott Bukatman Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke, 1993)
Carl Howard Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Wesleyan, 2000)
Paul Auster
Dennis Barone (ed.), Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (Pennsylvania, 1995)
Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews (Faber, 2000)
Aliki Varvogli, World That Is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction (Liverpool, 2002)
Don DeLillo
Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo (Twayne, 1993)
Frank Lentricchia (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo (Duke, 1991)
Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (Routledge, 2005)
Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don Delillo's Dialogue With Culture (Penn State, 2000)
Online resources
The internet offers a wealth of additional materials too numerous and ever-evolving to be listed here. However, the websites below have been tried and tested, and continue to offer excellent, academic-oriented support:
http://baas.ac.uk, British Association for American Studies website, has some excellent resources. The ‘BAAS Pamphlet’ series under the ‘Resources’ link offers free, downloadable guides to key American topics and concepts (e.g. the American Dream, Watergate, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, immigrant experiences) as well as some studies of relevant writers and genres (e.g. American crime fiction, Native American writing)
http://www.litencyc.com, home portal for The Literary Encyclopedia, a useful starting point for examining common literary terms. Also has an extensive range of introductory essays on a variety of authors and texts, including those pertaining to American literature, with a guide for further reading.
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/, Norton Anthology of American Literature Student website, which has a range of exercises on authors and topics (‘topic clusters’), as well as some very useful timelines to help students place works in the historical context – a little basic, but handy for the student new to American literature as a whole.
