Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War

Philipp Löffler explores the contemporary historical novel in conjunction with three cultural shifts that have crucially affected political and intellectual life in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s: the end of the Cold War, the decline of postmodernism, and the re-emergence of cultural pluralism. Contemporary historical fiction – from Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Philip Roth’s American Trilogy to Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy – relates and authorizes these developments by imagining the writing of history as a powerful form of world-making.

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