American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors. |
Contents
The Shocks of Transplantation | 9 |
Mythical Innocence | 40 |
Yearning for Lost Civilization | 75 |
Copyright | |
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African-American Amer American Dream American Psycho anarchy argues become Bellow Brautigan chapter characters Chinese civilization conspiracy Coover culture dead Dean's December death demonic discussed Doug Ecotopia ethnic Euro-American experience father feel Fools Crow gender Gerald Vizenor Heinlein human ican immigrants Indian innocence Ironweed Ishmael Ishmael Reed Jasmine Kennedy killed Kingston's lack land liberal literary Literature lives look magic Mailer male Mama Day middle-class moral Morrison mother murder mythic myths narrative Native American novel Oankali offers one's patterns Percy political Press problems protagonist Pynchon's Rabbit racial Ralph Ellison readers reality Reed Reed's romantic Sammler Sammler's Planet Saul Bellow sense sexual shows Silko social society soul spiritual story things tion Toni Morrison tradition tribal trickster Turner Diaries utopias values Vietnam violence vision Vizenor Vonnegut Walker Percy Welch woman women writers York