Katherine Da Cunha Lewin (editor) - Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Don DeLillo

CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Peter Childs,

Sebastian Groes and Kaye Mitchell

Guides in the Contemporary Critical Perspectives series provide companions to reading and studying major contemporary authors. They include new critical essays combining textual readings, cultural analysis and discussion of key critical and theoretical issues in a clear, accessible style. Each guide also includes a preface by a major contemporary writer, a new interview with the author, discussion of film and TV adaptation and guidance on further reading.

Titles in the series include:

Ali Smith edited by Monica Germana and Emily Horton

Andrea Levy edited by Jeannette Baxter and David James

Hilary Mantel edited by Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter

Ian McEwan (2nd Edition) edited by Sebastian Groes

J. G. Ballard edited by Jeannette Baxter

Julian Barnes edited by Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs

Kazuo Ishiguro edited by Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes

Salman Rushdie edited by Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan

Sarah Waters edited by Kaye Mitchell

Forthcoming titles:

David Mitchell edited by Wendy Knepper and Courtney Hopf

John Burnside edited by Ben Davies

Contents

Katherine Da Cunha Lewin and Kiron Ward

Tim Engles

Katherine Da Cunha Lewin

Graley Herren

Rebecca Harding

Mark Osteen

Maria Lauret

Ronan McKinney

Catherine Gander

David Cowart

Peter Boxall

The readership for contemporary fiction has never been greater. The explosion of reading groups and literary blogs, of university courses and school curricula, and even the apparent rude health of the literary marketplace indicate an ever-growing appetite for new work, for writing which responds to the complex, changing and challenging times in which we live. At the same time, readers seem ever more eager to engage in conversations about their reading, to devour the review pages, to pack the sessions at literary festivals and author events. Reading is an increasingly social activity, as we seek to share and refine our experience of the book, to clarify and extend our understanding.

It is this tremendous enthusiasm for contemporary fiction to which the Contemporary Critical Perspectives series responds. Our ambition is to offer readers of current fiction a comprehensive critical account of each authors work, presenting original, specially commissioned analyses of all aspects of their career, from a variety of different angles and approaches, as well as directions toward further reading and research.

Our brief to the contributors is to be scholarly, to draw on the latest thinking about narrative, or philosophy, or psychology, indeed whatever seemed to them most significant in drawing out the meanings and force of the texts in question, but also to focus closely on the words on the page, the stories and scenarios and forms which all of us meet first when we open a book. We insisted that these essays be accessible to that mythical beast, the Common Reader, who might just as readily be spotted at the Lowdham Book Festival as in a college seminar. In this way, we hope to have presented critical assessments of our writers in such a way as to contribute something to both of those environments, and also to have done something to bring together the most important qualities of each of them.

Jeannette Baxter, Peter Childs,
Sebastian Groes and Kaye Mitchell

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009) and Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (2013). A co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume VII: British and Irish Fiction since 1940 (2015), he currently edits the journal Textual Practice.

David Cowart is Louise Fry Scudder Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and held Fulbright chairs at the University of Helsinki (19923) and at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense (19967). In addition to his two monographs on the work of Thomas Pynchon, he is the author of Don DeLillo: The Physics of Language and Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Writing in Contemporary America. His most recent book is Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations in the Postmodern Period.

Tim Engles is a Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and edited books, and he is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching DeLillos White Noise (with John N. Duvall) and Critical Approaches to Don DeLillo (with Hugh Ruppersburg). His forthcoming book project is White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature.

Catherine Gander lectures in American literature at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her research addresses the interrelations of word and image in modern and contemporary American literature and culture. Her publications include Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (2013; IAAS biennial book prize winner), Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices (with Sarah Garland, 2016), and several journal articles and book chapters on American avant-gardes, radical form, literature, art and photography.

Rebecca Harding is a doctoral researcher in the School of English at the University of Sussex. Her CHASE-funded PhD project investigates the complex status of the body in Don DeLillos fiction. She co-edited the 2017 issue of Excursions, an interdisciplinary journal, and undertook four months placement to study the DeLillo papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in 2018.

Graley Herren is Professor and Chair of English at Xavier University. He is the author of a book and many articles on Samuel Beckett. He has published widely on other modern writers as well, including several essays on Don DeLillo. He has served for many years on the board of the annual Comparative Drama Conference, and he edited five volumes of the conferences Text & Presentation book series.

Maria Lauret is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Sussex, UK, where she teaches American Studies from colonial to contemporary times. A specialist in emerging or outsider literature, she is the author of Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America (1994), Alice Walker (2011) and co-author of Beginning American Ethnic Literatures (2001), and she has published articles on African American, feminist and ethnic topics, as well as on American immigration and Junot Daz. She is one of the founding editors of the journal Atlantic Studies, and her latest monograph, Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature (2014), reads American (im)migrant fiction, poetry, essays and life-writing in the context of not just a multicultural but also a persistently multilingual America.

Katherine Da Cunha Lewin is a tutor in American Studies at the University of Sussex. Her PhD thesis reads the work of Don DeLillo and J. M. Coetzee together as a means of exploring interiority and interior spaces in the novel. She recently completed a biographic entry on Don DeLillo for the