The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction Since 1940

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a twelve-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction, written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the ’literary’ novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, and tendencies.

This book offers an account of US fiction during a period demarcated by two traumatic moments: the eve of the entry of the United States into the Second World War and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The aftermath of the Second World War was arguably the high point of US nationalism, but in the years that followed, US writers would increasingly explore the possibility that US democracy was a failure, both at home and abroad. For so many of the writers whose work this volume explores, the idea of ＂nation＂ became suspect as did the idea of ＂national literature＂ as the foundation for US writing. Looking at post-1940s writing, the literary historian might well chart a movement within literary cultures away from nationalism and toward what we would call ＂cosmopolitanism,＂ a perspective that fosters conversations between the occupants of different cultural spaces and that regards difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved. During this period, the novel has had significant competition for the US public’s attention from other forms of narrative and media: film, television, comic books, videogames, and the internet and the various forms of social media that it spawned. If, however, the novel becomes a ＂residual＂ form during this period, it is by no means archaic. The novel has been reinvigorated over the past eighty years by its encounters with both emergent forms (such as film, television, comic books, and digital media) and the emergent voices typically associated with multiculturalism in the United States.

Cyrus R. K. Patell, Professor of English, New York University, Deborah Lindsay Williams, Clinical Professor of Liberal Studies, New York University

Cyrus R. K. Patell is Professor of English at New York University. He received his AB, AM, and PhD in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. His scholarship and teaching center on the theory and practice of world literature; cosmopolitanism; Global Shakespeare; Star Wars; minority discourse theory; literary historiography; and US literary history. His books include Emergent Us Literatures: From Multiculturalism in the Late Twentieth Century (NYU Press, 2014); Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and, most recently, Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Deborah Lindsay Williams is Clinical Professor of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her essays have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Paris Review, Brevity, and The Common. She has published widely about children’s literature and about US women’s writing, including Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) and, most recently, The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction in OUP’s Literary Agenda series (2023).