Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Contemporary literature and criticism examines how fiction written from roughly the mid-twentieth century onward responds to, and shapes, the cultural and historical conditions of its moment. Scholars trace how novelists like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace used fragmented narratives, self-referential irony, and encyclopedic scope to capture a world saturated with media, institutional opacity, and contested meaning — a mode broadly called postmodernism — while debating whether writers since the 1990s have begun moving toward something new, sometimes called metamodernism, that seeks sincerity without abandoning complexity. Events like 9/11 have sharpened these debates, prompting researchers to ask how literature processes collective trauma and shapes national memory in ways that journalism and history cannot. Open questions include whether the novel retains its capacity for cultural critique in an era of accelerating digital distraction, and how emerging voices are renegotiating the formal experiments of their postmodern predecessors.

Works

62,177

Total citations

229,370

Keywords

PostmodernismContemporary FictionThomas PynchonDavid Foster WallaceCultural CritiqueNarrative