Any effort to characterize, much less comment critically upon, the literary production of a century of which less than a quarter has elapsed is a task that is more than usually humbling for the literary critic. The scholar cannot rely on established canons (or counter-canons) of major authors, or on a broad consensus about the era’s characteristic aesthetic trends or styles that might become visible with greater historical distance. The events, debates, and controversies that consume the attention of writers and critics today may well be forgotten tomorrow, while writers and issues that might have seemed marginal at the time may come to seem to later readers like the most significant developments of that era.