In many ways, contemporary historical fiction seems to suggest that the problem of periodization was a direct consequence of the ending of the Cold War. Many of the novels discussed in the following chapters reveal the significance of the past in their attempts to gauge the signatures of a still-not-foreseeable future after 1989. The causality of the argument is persuasive, but it also tends to trivialize the immense diversity of literary forms and their institutional contexts that have occurred over the past twenty-five years. There simply is no natural bond or organic group identity among writers such as Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo. On the contrary, the idea of period coherence that we create through labels like the contemporary or the post-historical requires a set of arguments and theoretical commitments that do not always share the same institutional or theoretical backgrounds: theory production in the academic world, popular cultural markets, the structure of academic disciplines, or broader shifts in intellectual or political history. The purpose of this chapter is therefore twofold: to outline the idea of contemporary historical writing as a theoretical problem and to suggest how we may think of its historical emergence in the post–Cold War world.

One way to start speculating about such a genealogy would be to return to the year 1998 for a moment, a year that saw the release not only of Saving Private Ryan and the movie adaptation of Morrison's Beloved but also of Janice Radway's presidential address at the ASA (American Studies Association) convention in Seattle, “What's in a Name?” The significance of 1998 is of course coincidental, but nonetheless a crucial starting point for thinking about the 1990s and 2000s as a distinct period. “What's in a Name?” has arguably become one of the most remarkable institutional events in the recent history of American Studies. In hindsight, the speech—and now variously anthologized text—seems to capture a moment of critical disciplinary self-introspection while at the same time conveying the more general feeling of change and transition that characterized American culture throughout the 1990s. Radway's speech can be read as a summary statement about three decades of revisionist literary criticism and theory and as a visionary plea for the future restructuring of the American Studies community from a transnational perspective.