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ENGL 416: Modern/Contemporary Fiction: Suggested Readings

This research guide is designed to help students find research material that may assist them in their research for this class.

Readings available at Wiggins Memorial Library

Readings available at Wiggins Memorial Library

Readings not available at Wiggins Memorial Library

Our library does not have a copy of the books listed here, but you may request them through Interlibrary Loan.

You can click here to make an Interlibrary Loan request on Campbell's website.

Anderson, Water Truett.  The Truth about Truth:  De-confusing and Re-constructing the Postmodern World, 1995.

Barth, John.  The Friday Book:  Essays and Other Non-fiction, 1997. [includes “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment”]

Bradbury, Malcolm.  The Modern American Novel, 1994.

Brooker, P.  Modernism/postmodernism, 1992.

​Cornwell, N.  The Literary Fantastic: from Gothic to Postmodernism, 1990.

Culler, Jonathan.  The Pursuit of Signs:  Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, 1981.

Degli-Esposti, Christina.  Postmodernism in the Cinema, 1998.

Derrida, Jacques.  “How to Avoid Speaking:  Denials.” Languages of the Unsayable:  The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory.  Ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, 1989.

Detweiler Robert.  Breaking the Fall:  Religious Readings in Contemporary Fiction, 1989.

Detweiler Robert.  “Christ and the Christ Figure in American Fiction.”  Christian Scholar 17 (1964) 111-124.

Detweiler Robert, ed.  Art/Literature/Religion:  Life on the Borders.  Chico, CA:  Scholars, 1983.

Docherty, Thomas, ed.  Postmodernism:  A Reader, 1993.

Downing, David C.  “From Pillar to Post-Modernism:  C. S. Lewis and Current Critical Discourse.”  Christianity and Literature 46:2 (Winter 1997) 169-178. 

Edwards, Brian, ed.  Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction, 1997.

Fairlamb, Horace L.  Critical Conditions:  Postmodernity and the Question of Foundations, 1994.

Falck, Colin. Myth, truth, and literature: towards a true post-modernism, 1989.

Featherstone, M..  Postmodernism, 1988.

Fokkema, Douwe, and Hans Bertens, eds.  Approaching Postmodernism, 1986.

Friedman, Melvin J., and Ben Siegel, eds. Traditions, Voices, and Dreams:  The American Novel since the 1960s, 1995.

Garvin, Harry R. ed. Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, 1980.

​Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus; Toward a Postmodern Literature, 1971.

Hilfer, A.C. American Fiction Since 1940, 1992.

​Huyssen, A.  After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, 1988.

Jameson, F. Postmodernism and Consumer Society, 1985.

Kort, Wesley.  Modern Fiction and Human Time:  A Study in Narrative and Belief, 1986.

Kort, Wesley.  “Recent Fiction and Its Religious Implications.”  Comparative Literature Studies 3 (1966): 223-234.

Kort, Wesley.  “Religion and Literature in Postmodernist Contexts.”  Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58 (1990): 575-588. 

Kort, WesleyMoral Fiber:  Character and Belief in Recent American Fiction, 1982.

Lodge, D. The Modes of Writing. Chapter on "Postmodernist Fiction”, 1977.

​McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics, 1991.

Morris, David B.  Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, 1998.

Nicholson, Linda, ed.  Feminism/Postmodernism, 1990.

​Norris, Christopher.  The Truth about Postmodernism, 1993.

​Norris, ChristopherWhat’s Wrong with Postmodernism:  Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy, 1990.

Scott, Nathan A., JrThe Broken Center:  Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature, 1966. 

Scott, Nathan A., Jr.., ed.  The Climate of Faith in Modern Literature, 1964.

Scott, Nathan A., Jr.Negative Capability:  Studies in the New Literature and the Religious Situation, 1969.

Seed, David.  The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, 1988.

Sim, Stuart.  The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, 1999.

Smyth, E.J. Postmodernism andCcontemporary Fiction, 1991.

Tharp, Jac, and Harry T. Moore.  John Barth:  The Sublimity of Paradox, 1974.

Thomas Daniel Young, ed.  Modern American Fiction:  Form and Function, 1989.

Trachtenberg, Stanley. ed. Critical Rssays on American Postmodernism, 1995.

​Worthington, Kim L.  Self as Narrative:  Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction, 1996.

Zhang, Benzi.  Paradox of Chinese Boxes:  Narrative Reflexivity in Postmodern Fiction, 1993.