Nickel Boys, The

American Gothic literature inherited many time-worn tropes from its English Gothic precursor, along with a core preoccupation: anxiety about power and property. Yet the transatlantic journey left its mark on the genre--the English ghostly setting becomes the wilderness haunted by spectral Indians.

What does it mean to write African American literature after the end of legalized segregation? In this study of Colson Whitehead's first six novels, Marlon Lieber argues that this question has permeated the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's writing since his 1999 debut The Intuitionist. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology and Marxist critical theory, Lieber shows that Whitehead's oeuvre articulates the tension between the persistent presence of racism and transformations in the United States' class structure, which reveals new modes of abjection.

Writing the Past in Twenty-First-Century American Fiction examines contemporary novels profoundly shaped by a sense of historical consciousness. Authors including Ben Lerner, Colson Whitehead, Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru and Garth Greenwell each use flashbacks, historical parallels and non-sequential narrative arrangements to emphasize the re-emergence, in a twenty-first-century context, of historical structures and circumstances.