This chapter offers a schematic overview of the many different ways in which scholars and theorists have thought about what exactly makes literature neoliberal. After introducing several representational and heuristic models, the chapter summarizes the economic and theoretical history of neoliberalism in the United States and then introduces a four-phase approach to conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Identifying economic, political, sociocultural, and ontological features of neoliberalism, it offers brief readings of three US novels that foreground these distinct features. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which explores the intersection of finance capital and racial politics in 1980s New York City, helps us see neoliberalism as an economic and political phenomenon. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which worries about the aesthetic representation of revolutionary politics, reveals neoliberalism’s intrusion into the cultural domain. And Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad asks where meaning and value might be found in a world where art, language, and being have been captured by neoliberalism’s for-profit technologies. These three texts are exemplary neoliberal novels, but the differences among them also provide a fuller picture of the neoliberal novel as a literary phenomenon of the past four decades.

The horror novel appears in the late twentieth century as a significant genre of popular fiction. Growing out of older traditions of the European Gothic and weird fiction, and their trajectory through American literature, the horror novel has produced some of the most famous names in writing, such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Debates about the literary merits of horror have been frequent, but the genre undoubtedly holds an important place in fiction and in American culture more widely. The politics of the horror novel, then, are crucial. This chapter traces the history of critical commentary on the political position of horror, asking if it upholds or questions the status quo. It also moves beyond this model to examine modern transformations of the genre and self-conscious literary responses to the legacy of racism and misogyny that has been a subject of critique. Covering the horror novel’s response to varied social changes, including immigration, the sexual revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, this chapter argues that it is capable of both reflecting on and exploiting social fears, and that its politics are as varied as its form, which has far more variety than narrow genre definitions might suggest.

This chapter examines the politics of postmodern metafiction. Starting from the widespread view that 1970s postmodernism was “politically abortive” and interested primarily in language games, the chapter sets out to rethink this position. Turning back to the coining of the term “metafiction” by William Gass and considering some major examples of the form (including work by Kurt Vonnegut, among others), the opening half of the chapter introduces the idea that there is a lurking sense of identity politics beneath much canonical metafiction. Tracing lines of continuity with the work of white male modernist authors, the model of metafictional “author gods” is critically examined. The chapter goes on to establish a counter-tradition, making use of the work of bell hooks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to explore texts that use metafictional devices while resisting any illusion of supra-textual mastery. Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional science fiction epic Dhalgren is posited as the exemplar of this counter-tradition. The chapter makes the case that Delany’s text, overlooked by many scholars of the form, should sit at the center of any discussion of 1970s metafiction. The conclusion includes a brief survey of the implicit politics detectable in some recent examples of metafictional writing.

This chapter suggests that the chief subject of Western genre fiction is the politics of individual freedom. Novels that take the American West as their principal setting and subject, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Louis L’Amour’s Hondo (1953), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), along with short stories such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), ask questions that are fundamentally about liberalism. The chapter suggests that early genre Westerns tend to imagine the American West as a romantic space of absolute individual autonomy, whereas post-1970s Westerns reimagine the genre with a critical eye, as if to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the frontier myth was too often a cover story for conquest. Over the course of its twentieth-century invention and reinvention, one persistent feature of the Western genre was the many ways in which it positioned the signifiers of the West in order to imagine individualism in America.

This chapter examines the literary left over the course of the twentieth century. Beginning with an analysis of key nineteenth-century literary antecedents to later socialist and communist novels, it then focuses on early twentieth-century leftist novels drawn from realism, naturalism, and utopian socialism. The chapter pays special attention to influential fictional works by Upton Sinclair, notably The Jungle, and the many subsequent leftist novels spawned by Sinclair’s success. It surveys unique contributions to the literary left made by Black novelists such as Claude McKay and Richard Wright and by feminist writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin. The chapter ends with a brief analysis of post-1960s leftist writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson, who harnessed science fiction for revolutionary ends.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is an anglophone novel that aspires to heal the effects of conquest and colonization through a decolonial politics that accepts hybridity, recognizes the sensitive work involved in transitions, and embraces Indigenous knowledge. Even as Silko celebrates hybridization, transitions, and boundary-crossing, she recognizes that these processes have a dangerous side – specifically, the potentially world-destroying effects of the nuclear arms race. The novel shows that settler colonialism is one aspect of an unfolding pattern that denies limits and boundaries; with the invention of nuclear weapons, it threatens to destroy the world. Silko’s message echoes Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1974 essay “Non-Violence in American Society,” commenting on the era’s social justice movements. Giving narrative form to Deloria’s message, in Ceremony the multiple strands of Silko’s political thought – the Native American Renaissance and decolonization, environmentalism, feminism, antiwar and anti-nuclear activism – are woven together in a story that is also a healing ceremony for readers. Ceremony aims to create a world where indigeneity emerges as the dominant force for a world at risk that is also a world in transition.

This chapter studies the developments of autobiography as a literary genre in the graphic novel production since the 1960s. It analyzes the formal connections between author, narrator, and character, paying attention to the pragmatic aspects of the contract between author and reader, whose commitment to authenticity distinguishes autobiography from autofiction or semi-autobiography. The chapter starts with a historical overview of the genre, absent in comics for a long time, then rapidly coming to prominence in the graphic novel. It emphasizes the role of underground comix and engages in a close reading of two works: Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin (1972) and Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2001). Although both share a similar (critical) concern with the role of religion, their stylistic and narrative features and context are widely divergent. Green’s work is a clear example of countercultural transgression, whereas Blankets exemplifies the growing overlap between the graphic novel and young adult literature.

This chapter deals with two long-form narratives that can be considered forerunners of the graphic novel: Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong (1930) and Drake Waller, Matt Baker, and Ray Osrin’s It Rhymes with Lust (1950). It stresses the originality of these proto-graphic novels and offers a close reading of both works, while reexamining their connections with other visual forms, namely, slapstick comedy, the woodcut novel, and film noir. To propel his dynamic story forward, Gross developed new ways of experimenting with the shape of panels, their size (as defined by the frames that delimit them), and their site (their particular placement within the space of the page). The chapter also addresses issues of gender and studies the critical treatment of male and female stereotypes. Finally, it studies the representation of graphic violence, reading It Rhymes with Lust as an example of “soft noir.”

This chapter deals with the idiosyncratic works of two key authors from the Mad magazine generation: Harvey Kurtzman and Jules Feiffer. It addresses more specifically the distinctive satirical styles of both authors, who criticized and reconfigured, from a leftist and Jewish immigrant background, the standard signifiers of American mainstream culture. Although both authors contributed equally to the tradition of American cartooning, their work in the graphic novel field is highly divergent. Kurtzman started at EC in the war comics subgenre, but rapidly turned to humor magazines, before introducing an important stand-alone comics paperback with original material, Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, whose incongruous humor relied on clever, repetitive panel layouts. Like Kurtzman, Feiffer is adept at transmedial appropriation, but his work, which started under Will Eisner’s tutelage, is less focused on citational humor and both more personal and more political. Instead, Feiffer developed singular forms of graphic narratives targeting conformism. The chapter offers close readings of Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and Feiffer’s noir trilogy: Kill My Mother, Cousin Joseph, and The Ghost Script (all from the 2010s).

This chapter studies the expression of queerness, gender and sexual identity, and diversity in comics and graphic novels. It identifies several stages in the history of the medium, from earlier coded or implicit representations of queer identities designed to circumvent the Comics Code Authority to increasingly and openly acknowledged visualizations of non-heteronormative subject matters in contemporary works. The chapter offers close readings of various coming-out narratives that use the graphic memoir form as a space for self-excavation and self-disclosure, drawing connections with a wider social of familial context (Howard Cruse, David Wojnarowicz, and especially Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home catapulted queer graphic novels into the mainstream). It also contrasts the “normalization” approach of mainstream publishers, who focus on diversity and support equality by featuring queer characters in ensemble casts, albeit at the risk of presenting a superficial image of queerness, and the more exclusive focus of alternative publishers and individually produced comics-zines, more centered on personal experiences.