Description
The years 19892008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post*45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these yearsspecifically the post-baby boom generation of writers born between the late 1950s and early 1970sresponded to the times by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity. How, and in what way, these writers ask, can you mean what you say, and avow what you feel, when what you say and feel can be bought and sold on the market? What is authentic art in a historical moment when the artist has become a model for neoliberal subjectivity rather than its negation? Through six chapters focused on key writers of the periodincluding Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallacethe book explores these central questions while intervening critically in a set of debates in contemporary literary studies concerning aesthe
