Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Contemporary literature and criticism examines fiction written from roughly the mid-twentieth century onward, asking how novels, stories, and the theories we use to read them respond to shifting cultural, political, and historical conditions. Postmodern fiction—associated with writers like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace—challenged assumptions about reliable narration, stable meaning, and the boundary between high and popular culture, while more recent work explores whether a "metamodern" sensibility is emerging that tempers irony with renewed sincerity. Scholars in this area are particularly attentive to how literature registers collective trauma, including the ways 9/11 reshaped national memory and prompted writers to rethink what narrative can honestly claim to represent. Open questions include how contemporary fiction can sustain meaningful cultural critique without retreating into self-referential games, and how digital media and global circulation are altering the conditions under which literary culture itself is produced and read.

Works

61,784

Total citations

228,626

Keywords

PostmodernismContemporary FictionThomas PynchonDavid Foster WallaceCultural CritiqueNarrative