The Dynamics of Residual and Emergent in the American Novel after 1940

Abstract

It has become almost a critical commonplace at the outset of the twenty-first century to view the novel as a form that is past its prime. We have had to confront that idea as we prepare to edit the forthcoming volume eight of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, devoted to American fiction after 1940, and we find ourselves inclined to make the counterargument: that the novel has been reinvigorated over the past sixty years by its encounters with both emergent forms (such as film, television and digital media) and the emergent voices typically associated with multiculturalism in the United States. We believe that it is the task of the literary historian of this period to understand the novel’s place within a set of intersecting histories that function as an interpretative prism. The one thing the novel is not is ‘archaic’: it continues to have cultural force, even if it is increasingly being read on e-readers and tablet computers.