Focusing on a variety of topics, from the violence of war and the struggle for civil rights to the social impact of technology and the moral significance of money, this colorfully illustrated guide to American literature from the postwar period to the present day has been expanded and fully updated. A new section titled "Into the Future" contains a discussion of the best young writers of recent years. A concise, engaging guide to American contemporary literature, this volume provides information on 21st-century writers; the 1950s, '60s, and beyond; contemporary American poetry; and the postmodern movement. Topics include: Post-World War II and Vietnam War literature New Journalism Beat literature and existentialism The rise of ethnic and minority literature The civil rights movement Postmodernism Confessional poetry and poetry of witness Millennial voices in fiction And more. Writers covered include: Raymond Carver Sandra Cisneros Ralph Ellison Robert Frost Norman Mailer N. Scott Momaday Toni Morrison Sylvia Plath Thomas Pynchon Adrienne Rich J.D. Salinger Kurt Vonnegut Tom Wolfe And many others.

Writing the Nation displays key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature. Contents: Late Romanticism (1855-1870) Realism (1865-1890) Local Color (1865-1885) Regionalism (1875-1895) William Dean Howells Ambrose Bierce Henry James Sarah Orne Jewett Kate Chopin Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Charles Waddell Chesnutt Charlotte Perkins Gilman Naturalism (1890-1914) Frank Norris Stephen Crane Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Growth of Modernism (1893 - 1914) Booker T. Washington Zane Grey Modernism (1914 - 1945) The Great War Une Generation Perdue... (a Lost Generation) A Modern Nation Technology Modernist Literature Further Reading: Additional Secondary Sources Robert Frost Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams Ezra Pound Marianne Moore T. S. Eliot Edna St. Vincent Millay E. E. Cummings F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Arthur Miller Southern Renaissance – First Wave Ellen Glasgow William Faulkner Eudora Alice Welty The Harlem Renaissance Jessie Redmon Fauset Zora Neale Hurston Nella Larsen Langston Hughes Countee Cullen Jean Toomer American Literature Since 1945 (1945 - Present) Southern Literary Renaissance - Second Wave (1945-1965) The Cold War and the Southern Literary Renaissance Economic Prosperity The Civil Rights Movement in the South New Criticism and the Rise of the MFA Program Innovation Tennessee Williams James Dickey Flannery O'Connor Postmodernism Theodore Roethke Ralph Ellison James Baldwin Allen Ginsberg Adrienne Rich Toni Morrison Donald Barthelme Sylvia Plath Don Delillo Alice Walker Leslie Marmon Silko David Foster Wallace

Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.

This is an introduction to the study of America since 1945--the period in which the US became a world power. Alternate chapters provide the historical background and illuminate themes through culture and the arts, grounding students in the facts before exploring more interpretive approaches. In this way, awareness of central currents in art, film, theater, intellectual history and media is developed alongside an understanding of political and social change.

Unrivaled diversity and ease of use have made THE HEATH ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME E: CONTEMPORARY PERIOD (1945 TO THE PRESENT), 6th Edition a best-selling text since 1989, when the first edition was published. In presenting a more inclusive canon of American literature, THE HEATH ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME E: CONTEMPORARY PERIOD (1945 TO THE PRESENT), 6th Edition continues to balance the traditional, leading names in American literature with lesser-known writers and to build upon the anthology's other strengths: its apparatus and its ancillaries. Available in five volumes for greater flexibility, the 6th Edition offers thematic clusters to stimulate classroom discussions and showcase the treatment of important topics across the genres.

The Outline of American literature, newly revised, traces the paths of American narrative, fiction, poetry and drama as they move from pre-colonial times into the present, through such literary movements as romanticism, realism and experimentation. Contents: 1) Early American and Colonial Period to 1776. 2) Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776-1820. 3) The Romantic Period, 1820-1860, Essayists and Poets. 4) The Romantic Period, 1820-1860, Fiction. 5) The Rise of Realism: 1860-1914. 6) Modernism and Experimentation: 1914-1945. 7) American Poetry, 1945-1990: The Anti-Tradition. 8) American Prose, 1945-1990: Realism and Experimentation. 9) Contemporary American Poetry. 10) Contemporary American Literature.