Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and U.S. Regionalism, 1945-2020 (New American Canon) - Softcover

Keith Wilhite (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609388577 ISBN 13: 9781609388577

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2022

Synopsis

Contested Terrain explores suburban literature between two moments of domestic crisis: the housing shortage that gave rise to the modern era of suburbanization after World War II, and the mortgage defaults and housing foreclosures that precipitated the Great Recession. Moving away from scholarship that highlights the alienating, placeless quality of suburbia, Wilhite argues that we should reimagine suburban literature as part of a long literary tradition of U.S. regional writing that connects the isolation and exclusivity of the domestic realm to the expansionist ideologies of U.S. nationalism and the environmental imperialism of urban sprawl. Wilhite produces new, unexpected readings of works by Sinclair Lewis, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Yates, Patricia Highsmith, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-rae Lee, Richard Ford, Jung Yun, and Patrick Flanery. Contested Terrain demonstrates how postwar suburban nation-building ushered in an informal geography that recalibrated notions of national identity, democratic citizenship, and domestic security to the scale of the single-family home.

About this title

About the Author

Keith Wilhite is associate professor of English at Siena College. He is editor of The City Since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television. Wilhite lives in Albany, New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1609388577
• ISBN 13: 9781609388577
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280