The Dialectic of Self and Story: Reading and Storytelling in Contemporary American Fiction (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, historical dislocation, and authorial self-reflexiveness. Machine generated contents note: I Introduction: The Fiction in the Story and the Story in the Fiction 1 II The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Postmodern Text 13 III Toward Transcendence: Reading and Writing in Raymond Carver's Fiction 17 IV Reading the Landscape: Richard Ford's New Realism 37 V Beyond Ethnicity: Realism and Postmodernism in Louise Erdrich's Novels 53 VI Reading and Storytelling in Selected Fiction of the Vietnam War 71 VII Epilogue: An Extended Map Reading of Contemporary American Fiction 97. First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.