Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel

[headline]Examines the connection between historical and speculative fiction to offer a new form of literary-genre fiction that registers the upheavals of the early twenty-first century Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in US literature. Discussing novels by Ken Kalfus, Joyce Carol Oates and Colson Whitehead, among others, it provides detailed critical readings of key writers of the early twenty-first century and integrates questions of critical method, genre, form, and literary theory, all of which have some urgency today. Addressing itself to the question of how to read this mode through a form of utopian hermeneutics, this study explores the formal constitution, narrative choices, and place in the wider literary market of a mode that Lanzendörfer argues is constitutively important for understanding American literature's struggle with the possibility of imagining hopeful futures. [bio]Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Research Associate Professor for Literary Theory, Literary Studies and Literary Studies Education at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. His previous publications include Books of the Dead (2018) and The Professionalization of the American Magazine (2013), which won the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize in 2015. He is also editor of the Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (2021) and co-editor of Medial Afterlives of H. P. Lovecraft (with Max Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, 2023) and of The Novel as Network (with Corinna Norrick-Rühl, 2020).