Amy Hungerford is a leading scholar of 20th- and 21st-century American literature, with a particular focus on the post-1945 era. Her critical work delves into the intricate relationship between genocide, literature, and the concept of personification, exploring how texts grapple with profound historical trauma. She investigates the evolution of postmodern belief through American literature and its connection to religion since the 1960s. Hungerford's scholarship illuminates the distinctive qualities of the American novel in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond.
"Examines the implications of conflating texts with people in a broad range of texts: Art Spiegelman's Maus, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake Holocaust memoir Fragments, and the fiction of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Don Delillo."--Jacket.
Exploring the intersection of intense religious beliefs and pluralism in modern America, the book delves into how belief can exist without strict doctrine. It highlights the significance of religious imagination in contemporary practices and in notable American literature over the past fifty years. Amy Hungerford illustrates how imaginative literature and religious practices enable writers and critics to elevate language to a transcendent level, imbuing words with a religious significance that transcends their literal meanings.
Through fascinating case studies of people working in publishing both large and small-scale, traditional and digital, this book tells the story of how new literary work emerges and finds readers in our era of too many books.