Abstract

"The literature of the 1990s and early 2000s was a catchall of voices and styles: experimental and staid, high and low, monumental and grotesque—often all at once. While an older generation of novelists—Peter Carey and Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison and Barry Unsworth—retreated to history, choosing to fictionalize the past rather than be consumed by the present, a new group of avant gardists—Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and Zadie Smith—tried their hand at the now. Inspired by the speculative fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, they sought to write the next BIG NOVEL: fiction capacious enough to contain the wide girth of post-Cold War capitalism. But if the literature of the turn of the twentieth century appeared to be a frenzy of new voices and styles, it was also oriented toward a common goal. For unlike their predecessors, this new generation sought to rebuild the world rather than deconstruct it."

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