... from the variety and general utility of volumes published this year. Many of these books—virtually all of them published by trade presses—continue to focus on ethnic, women, and/or regional writers. At its best, the DLB participates in this project of reclaiming marginalized or neglected...

... of reference tools focus on minority writers and literatures, a burgeoning field that is no longer a mere ‘‘niche’’ in the book market. Several scholars reminisce about the Beats, once the scourge of academe. Overall, the reference books published in 2003 demonstrate that traditional literary...

... American nature writers” into a Google search box and receive in response—in 0.19 seconds—the first section of a list of 47,200,000 results is impressive but dauntingly unhelpful. So the reader of this essay should be aware that though I may be critical of particular works because of choices made...

... theoretical concepts, women writers, and racial and ethnic categories are among the examples. But to follow developing trends does not mean to abandon the more traditional ones with their focus on generic categories—the novel, drama, science fiction, and detective fiction—or on historical periods...

...  General Studies No sooner did writers such as David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Mark Danielewski, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Safran Foer disavow the tenets of postmodernism that had held fast during their student days than Mary K. Holland began arguing that their work “remains post- modern...

... of AmLS except T. S. Eliot (because he does not quality as an American author as well as such writers as Poe, Updike, Increase Mather, Dreiser, Ellison, Gilman, and Langston Hughes. It sketches most of the American writers who have received the Nobel Prize for literature...

... literature. No camp, no methodology dominates. The work reviewed here focuses on single writers and on clusters of writers; it marks new approaches to established figures as well as to those recently canonized; it uses established forms of literary analysis to intro- duce hitherto unrecognized writers...

...Jerome Klinkowitz Duke University Press 2005 16 Fiction: The 1960s to the Present Jerome Klinkowitz Reaching into its fifth decade, this chapter addressing developments in ‘‘contemporary’’ fiction now covers events of an adult lifetime. Writers whose fame and importance began...

... for understand- ing individual writers and their specific works What kind of tool is not entirely clear to me. The approximately 200 alphabetically arranged entries each identify a writer with no other information except year of birth and then quote excerpts from critical commentary taken from periodicals...

... and intellectual relationships among (some- times intimate) groups of writers to studies that detail shifting ap- proaches to reading and writing, from investigations of the e Vects of audience and public markets on writer and genre to those that resurrect forgotten literary Žgures. Scholars...

...Catherine Calloway Duke University Press 2004 15 Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s Catherine Calloway There are no major changes in direction in this year’s scholarship, al- though several previously overlooked writers achieve a more centralized location in the modernist arena...

... and masculinity serve as the subjects of an interesting examination of the portrayal of young men in the period’s literature, and a fascinating study traces the influence of technology on the formation of a literary “free market” that helped writers depend less on literary patronage. As always, numerous...

... studies continue the recent tendency to explicate the political, social, or religious contexts at work in the period’s writings. African American writers and their contributions to the nation’s literature inform some of the more thought-provoking of these studies. Two essays provide...

... and more substantial opportunities. In his survey in this chapter last year, for instance, Gary Scharnhorst highlighted the trend toward works ‘‘devoted to ethnic and/or women writers That trend certainly continues in 2000. African-American Writ- ers: A Dictionary, ed. Shari Dorantes Hatch...

...) Pearl S. Buck; and American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supple- ment 16, ed. Jay Parini (Thomson), with 18 entries, mostly devoted to popular contemporary figures such as Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), Garrison Keillor, and George Plimpton. Continuing the trend of recent...

... sublime What more radical authors propose as imaginative reconstruction (for speciŽcally social and political reasons, as Cornis-Pope and Moraru have explained), Elias’s more traditionalist writers accept as ‘‘the humanist value of fabula a storytelling impulse they at once desire...

... of the West.” Uncovering this “archive of relations places new kinds of critical demands on the practice of liter- ary historiography,” Rubin asserts, “particularly in the framework of the present.” He finds that government sponsorship of writers’ conferences, scholarly meetings, performances...

... . . . of the psychiatric milieu that was dictating to him during the nightmare of Zelda’s incarceration.” Able neither to cure Zelda nor to inhibit her from assuming the role of writer (by publishing Save Me the Waltz), he can compensate for any perceived impotence by devising the sentimental plot of a woman...

... of journals this year have published special issues and articles devoted to the global pandemic, drawing on the work of late-20th-century writers like Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick to better understand the crises of the present. The categories of utopia and dystopia are an especially...

...Nicolas S. Witschi Duke University Press 2008 12  Late-19th-Century Literature Nicolas S. Witschi Two major biographies, a new journal, and an ever-increasing interest in the various ways in which writers made use of the idea of realism set the tone for scholarship this year...