Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in U.S. literature. Discussing in depth novels by writers such as Ken Kalfus, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colson Whitehead, among others, it 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 it believes to be constitutively important for understanding American literature's struggle with the possibility of imagining hopeful futures.

About the Author
Tim Lanzendorfer is Heisenberg Research Associate Professor for Literary Theory, Literary Studies and Literary Studies Education at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. His previous publications include the monographs Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature (UP Mississippi, 2018) and The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic (Schoningh, 2013), which won the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize in 2015. Most recently, he has been the editor of the Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (Routledge 2021) and co-editor of The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities (with Corinna Norrick-Ruhl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and of Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).


Book Information
ISBN 9781399519151
Author Tim Lanzendorfer
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press