Description
Book SynopsisAfter the Fall A common refrain heard since the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 is that everything has changed. After the Fall presents a timely and provocative examination of the impact and implications of 9/11 and the war on terror on American culture and literature. Author Richard Gray widely regarded as the leading European scholar in American literature reveals the widespread belief among novelists, dramatists, and poets as well as the American public at large that in the post-9/11 world they are all somehow living after the fall. He carefully considers how many writers, faced with what they see as the end of their world, have retreated into the seductive pieties of home, hearth, and family; and how their works are informed by the equally seductive myth of American exceptionalism. As a counterbalance, Gray also discusses in depth the many writings that get it right transnational and genuinely crossbred works that resist the opp
Trade Review
“There an amazing richness of the material Richard Gray covers in. . . After the Fall: American Literature Since 9/11After the Fall is skillfully structured and convincingly argued.” (Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 1 October 2014)
"Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." (Choice, 1 January 2012)
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
1 After the Fall 1
2 Imagining Disaster 21
3 Imagining Crisis 51
4 Imagining the Transnational 85
5 Imagining the Crisis in Drama and Poetry 145
Works Cited 193
Index 211
