The death of the book is good for literature. At least, one can draw this conclusion from contemporary American fiction. The threat or promise of an increasingly paperless society prompts innovation through interaction with digital technologies and, as a result, reinvigorates literature in both print and digital formats. To assess where American fiction is and where it is going, I examine a few case studies of recent print and digital literature that share a commitment to pushing literature's boundaries by experimenting with its media. My focus is cutting-edge, avant-garde literature because these works blaze the paths others will follow. Instead of withering away, such works show how fiction finds new sources of inspiration in and from digital technologies and networked reading practices. So, at the intersections of new media and traditional literary practices, whither American fiction?

An examination of recent literary engagements with the digital exposes two significant trends: fiction that embraces new media to experiment with ways of representing digitality, and fiction that retreats from the digital through acts of aestheticizing and fetishizing the printed book. These trends are not opposites but are mutually dependent, and their dialectical relationship, I argue, revolves around the concept of remediation. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define remediation as “the representation of one medium in another,” and they see remediation as “a defining characteristic of the new digital media.”

Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, the first African American woman to be so honored. A major focus of her work is the reinterpretation of key events and periods in African American women's history. Within this framework, her fiction explores themes such as race, gender, redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, love, and desire. To date, she is the author of nine novels, including one of the most significant trilogies in modern American literature.

Morrison's trilogy, consisting of Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997), spans 150 years of African American history. While the conventional historical saga usually charts a sequential narrative through generations of the same family, Morrison's trilogy consists of three very different novels, each located in an important period in black history. In its scope and form, Beloved is generally regarded as her most ambitious refocusing of history, in this case an exploration of slavery in nineteenth-century America from a black woman's perspective. But to fully understand this aspect of Morrison's work, it is important to recognize the way in which her novels juxtapose events from different periods of history and weave literary and historical allusions, myths, fables, and cultural anecdotes together.

Metafiction is fiction that calls attention to its representational techniques and knowledge claims. However, metafiction is something neither new nor inherently American. As Gerald Prince has noted, the novel, as a genre, harbors a range of possible narrative strategies that include metanarrative constructions such as self-reflexivity, and this accounts for why novels with metafictional elements appear at different historical moments, well before the second half of the twentieth century. Citing fiction from numerous literary periods, Robert Alter defines metafiction within the larger category of “self-conscious fiction,” as does Brian Stonehill, who defines metafiction as “an essentially ludic art form” that includes books in which narrators are clearly engaged in the act of composition or which point to the author behind a succession of narrators, or novels that feature ostentatious and nonmimetic style, conspicuous structural architecture, flat characters often aware of their status as characters, or self-parody and skepticism concerning the satirical efficacy of language. For instance, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), with its self-conscious eponymous narrator and comically digressive disruptions of linear plot, is an exemplary work of metafiction. But one can turn to even earlier prose fiction for other examples. Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615) plays with notions of authorship in ways that have inspired twentieth-century metafictionists such as Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. And American postmodernist John Barth has made it clear that his use of tale-within-tale structure derives in part from his fascination with the storyteller Scheherazade in Richard F. Burton's 1885 translation of the tenth-century Persian epic, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

Throughout the years following World War II (and particularly since the 1960s), there have been spectacular advances in the quantity and influence of multicultural American authorship. Just as Latino/a and Asian American populations have grown increasingly prominent in the United States, so a plenitude of new literary fiction – novel and novella, story and story cycle – has emerged to match and indeed engender a rethinking of what “ethnic” and allied notions actually signify. This, to be sure, includes reaffirmation and continuance of the Latino/a literary spectrum, the Chicanismo signaled in the fiction of Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, and Rolando Hinojosa, and a women's generation to include Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo, together with the rosters of new storytelling by Riqueños/as, Cuban Americans, Dominican Americans, and others whose origins in the Latin and Caribbean Americas give a hemispheric reach to Hispanic voice. An awakened Asian American literary consciousness equally invites its due; narratives that severally but always uniquely pursue American lives filtered through China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indo-Pakistan and other South Asian countries, by such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Toshio Mori, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lan Cao, Jessica Hagedorn, and Bharati Mukherjee.

Despite the formal innovations of the high postmodernists, the vast majority of American fiction published since 1945 has made no pretense of being avant-garde or experimental, but rather has remained unabashedly realist in its rendering of character, setting, and time. This is not surprising. As Raymond Carver once remarked, true formal innovation in fiction, while “cause for rejoicing,” is exceedingly rare. Too often what has been proclaimed innovative has proven on closer examination to be little more than the repetition of certain postmodernist devices (self-reflexivity in narration, for example) that long ago lost their ability to surprise. Indeed, during the period in question, realism has proven to be far more resilient and adaptable to change than “metafiction,” “surfiction,” “fabulism,” or any of the other -isms subsumed under the umbrella of literary postmodernism. The fact is, realism continued to be practiced by major writers throughout the period of high postmodernism, and the years since 1980 have witnessed the emergence of a renewed or revitalized realism marked by its variety and wide range of effects. Because of this it makes sense to speak not of a monolithic realism, but rather of a number of different, at times overlapping, realisms, all of them making use of a common core of techniques and exhibiting the same belief in the power of language to accurately represent life “as it really is.”

When John Hersey ended the first chapter of Hiroshima (1946) by describing the burial of Toshiko Sasaki beneath the rubble of the East Asia Tin Works, his decision to focus “principally and first of all” on the bookcases that collapsed upon her on August 6, 1945, signaled his feelings about the collapse of available literary forms, all of which proved inadequate to convey the devastation of the atom bomb that he was trying to recreate. In this recognition of the limitations of existing narrative forms, Hersey anticipated by two decades one of the primary impulses behind the emergence of new journalism and the nonfiction novel, twin phenomena whose birth date, as John Hellmann argues, can be given as 1965, the year that saw the publication of Tom Wolfe's first essay collection, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and the serialization of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in The New Yorker. The other primary impulse comes by way of a story Hunter S. Thompson tells about standing beside a Lear Jet that Richard Nixon is about to board during his 1968 presidential election campaign and being frantically thrust aside when a Nixon aide realizes he is smoking one Marlboro after another over the fuel tank. Thinking he can defend himself by reminding the advance man that he is a “sane, responsible journalist” who, otherwise, might have hurled his flaming Zippo into the tank, Thompson is exposed for the precise kind of journalist he is by the man who easily sees through the (il)logic of his reasoning: “Egomaniacs don't do that kind of thing … You wouldn't do anything you couldn't live to write about.”

“Consciousness and conscience,” admonished Ralph Ellison, “are the burdens imposed upon us by the American experiment.” Penned just months before Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Ellison's characterization of a peculiarly American civic obligation undoubtedly reflected his own experience with a Jim Crow that steadily crept to the frontier he called home – Oklahoma. His words were certainly a response to a global struggle for decolonization and to the political unrest and hope inspired by the nation's ongoing revolution in race relations. By May 1964, Ellison, like all Americans, had experienced (if only through newspaper accounts and televised reports) events that are now recognized as crucial to the Civil Rights Movement: the bravery of the “Little Rock Nine,” who helped usher in the judicially mandated desegregation of public schools; the brutal lynching in Mississippi of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who had supposedly flirted with a white woman; the year-long bus boycotts spurred by the defiance of Rosa Parks; the march led by Martin Luther King, Jr. on the nation's capital; and the Sunday morning church bombing that killed four girls in Birmingham, Alabama. Ellison's call to “consciousness and conscience” reveals his commitment to the nation's experiment in democracy and offers a slogan capturing the moral aesthetics suffusing his work. He was convinced that writing was “an ethical instrument,” and that American writing, in particular, “might well exercise some choice in the ethic it prefers to support.”

Born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, Flannery O'Connor was an only child and a cradle Catholic in one of the most Protestant areas of the United States, the Deep South. Her father's declining health forced O'Connor and her mother to move to the latter's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia in 1938, where O'Connor began high school as a writer and illustrator for the student newspaper. Three years later her father died, at the age of forty-four, of disseminated lupus, an incurable autoimmune disease. The following year O'Connor entered Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, majoring in sociology and English, writing fiction and poetry for the college literary magazine, and contributing satirical cartoons to the yearbook. Her vivid visual sense and gift for caricature would inform her mature fiction, in striking depictions of rural and urban landscapes and deft, often devastating physical portraits of her characters.

After graduating in 1945, she went on to study journalism at the University of Iowa but soon joined the Writers' Workshop, the first program in the country to offer the MFA degree in creative writing. Guided by Workshop director Paul Engle and a series of mentors including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Austin Warren – some of the founding figures in American New Criticism – she enjoyed almost instant success as a fiction writer, publishing her first story in 1946 and placing work with Mademoiselle and Sewanee Review the following year.

Science fiction represents, along with film, one of the most significant global forms to emerge in the twentieth century, its estranging visions of other worlds bringing into focus the dramatic transformations that define modernity. Thus, as Pascale Casanova argues in the case of the novel more generally, it is difficult to constrain its history to one nation. However, by the end of World War II, the United States had come to dominate science fiction. The story of how this came to pass is a fascinating one. While there were major American precursors – including Edgar Allan Poe and Edward Bellamy – what we think of as science fiction emerged at the close of the nineteenth century in the “scientific romances” of the British author, H. G. Wells. Wells's work paved the way for a dramatic global production of the genre in a diverse group of writers, many of whom treat science fiction as a form of modernist experimental literature.

However, a number of developments in the 1920s helped conclude this opening chapter in the genre's history. First, the increasing intolerance within the Soviet Union for artistic experimentation put one fecund tradition on hold until the 1950s. Second, as Roger Luckhurst maintains, the use of Wells's work as “a negative foil in aesthetics” by the British modernist writing establishment meant that those “who continued with the scientific romance did so in conditions of marginality and insularity. Finally and most significantly, the emergence of science fiction pulp magazines, beginning in 1926 with Amazing Stories under the editorship of Hugo Gernsback (who also coined the term “science fiction”), set the genre’s agenda for the coming decades.

In the last decade, American fiction has articulated important political, aesthetic, and psychological contexts for understanding the wounds of September 11, 2001. This body of work does so in one of two ways: by directly representing the terrorist attacks or by displacing the attacks historically, allegorically, or metafictionally. This chapter first examines the former representational method before taking up the latter narrative strategy.

Fiction that directly addresses 9/11 and its aftermath focuses almost exclusively on the attack on the World Trade Center. The symbolic impact of the Twin Towers' destruction, televised as it was around the world, has made New York City the nexus of the 9/11 imagination for many novelists as they depict the lives of New Yorkers who were the victims, the survivors, or the witnesses of the devastation. These narratives of individual trauma and loss, however, have been deemed a failure on a number of fronts. Indian author Pankaj Mishra expresses disappointment that American novelists have retreated “to the domestic life” and have struggled “to define cultural otherness” of Islam. Richard Gray notes that much of the American fiction about the terrorist attacks emphasizes “the preliminary stages of trauma.” His assessment, however, echoes Mishra's: American fiction that directly engages 9/11 “adds next to nothing to our understanding of the trauma at the heart of the action. In fact, it evades that trauma” by its focus on domestic issues and personal lives, rather than “facing the [Islamic] other.”

In 1837 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a professor of modern languages at Harvard, a hardworking teacher still growing into his new job. Three years later, after Voices of the Night (1839) and Ballads and Other Poems (1841), he was famous: after Evangeline (1847) and The Song of Hiawatha (1855), he would become and remain for decades (to quote his preeminent modern critic, Christoph Irmscher) “America's, if not the world's, most widely recognized poet,” admired by Queen Victoria and by her servants, and in his own country “so famous … that he was asked [to name] a new state in the Union.” Schoolchildren all over the USA, for almost a century, memorized his poems in schools that bore his name.

Longfellow's broad and lasting popularity has become the most salient fact about him. “Not whole poems but memorable snatches” of his poetry, Dana Gioia wrote in 1994, survive even now in “American oral culture”: “I shot an arrow into the air,” “like ships that pass in the night,” “Into each life a little rain must fall.” Americans wanted to hear what Longfellow wanted to say, and to buy what he wanted to sell: “a gentry-class poet in a democratic land,” as Matthew Gartner put it, he showed how educated Cambridge and aristocratic Boston could speak to – could even unify – the American multitudes.

This chapter originated as an inquiry into the site of enunciation of Whitman's “Song of Myself.” Throughout “Song of Myself,” the poet took up a trans-subjective stance that enabled him to straddle heterogeneous places and historical periods indifferent to the determinations of time and place. Was there a passage in the poem in which he acquired this freedom from the determinations of time and place?

My attempt to answer this question coincided with my effort to explain why Whitman had included the memory of the colonial violence that took place in Goliad within “Song of Myself.” Over time these seemingly incompatible processes of inquiry merged into the discovery that Whitman's poetic witness to the mass slaughter at Goliad located the otherwise unclaimable site of enunciation for “Song of Myself.”

This chapter constitutes an effort to find terms to explain the complicated relationship between the site of enunciation of Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” and the colonial violence that this literary formation at once disavowed yet revealed. What Walter Mignolo has described as the “dark side” of the American Renaissance came to light in the antebellum United States when the rebirth of classical legacies within the so-called masterworks of the United States' literary tradition coincided with colonial expansion.

Scholarship and teaching about nineteenth-century American poetry usually shows no awareness of American Indian poetry. Often, when the concept of American Indian poetry is even mentioned, it comes up only to note the supposed absence of poetry by American Indians, even though white American poets wrote so much about Indians. Rarely, scholars take note of two or three Indian poets, typically Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, John Rollin Ridge/ Yellow Bird, or Alex Posey, all writers known (when at all) more for their prose than for their poetry. Lamenting the absence of attention to early American Indian poetry, and suspecting that there must have been a good deal of it, I took up the not so extraordinary yet more or less unprecedented task of looking for it. When I looked, I found many poems, including far more poems by Schoolcraft, Ridge, and Posey than even the few scholars who attended to those writers had seen. I put together an anthology, Changing is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 that showcases the work of 83 poets, including 39 from the nineteenth century, and provides a bibliography listing the work of almost 150 Indian poets up to 1930, 51 of them from the nineteenth century. Drawing on that anthology, this chapter takes up the modest but in some ways – for the history of nineteenth-century American poetry – revolutionary task of introducing the range and preoccupations of early American Indian poetry.

Writing to Edmund Clarence Stedman sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s, poet Sarah Piatt expresses no small irritation at his or his “friends'” apparent rejection of her verse. While the details are unclear, her tone is not. Following a tensely polite salutation and words of customary modesty, she goes on to insist that whatever time Stedman had spent “discussing” her verse was ill spent: “I am sorry that you took the trouble to speak of me at all. I do not belong to the animals that go in herds. Whether my place be on the height or elsewhere, I choose to stand alone.” Implying that whatever venue he was considering her poems for, likely a magazine or anthology, was the domain of the “herds,” Piatt implicitly likens her contemporaries to literary sheep and positions herself in opposition to them. Sounding out from what has long been considered the female choir of submission, the defiance in Piatt's letter appeals to a deep desire I recognize in both myself and my students, one that is likely shared by many twenty-first-century readers of nineteenth-century women's poetry: the desire to hear women declare openly their deep frustration with the powers that restricted their range of lived experience and expression.

For all of this defiance, though, much of Piatt's life in print conformed to, cultivated, and maintained a version of female authorship often associated with “the herds” of male and female writers whose poetry filled the pages of newspapers and periodicals and whose books lined the shelves of nineteenth-century parlors.

Most popular and scholarly accounts of Dickinson represent her at home – that is, on 280 Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson's residence from 1830 to 1840 and from 1855 until her death in 1886. By the age of 30, in 1860, she was relatively reclusive, and in 1865 she wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson that “To an Emigrant, Country is idle except it be his own … I do not cross my Father's ground to any House or town” (L330). Cartoonists have memorably portrayed Dickinson as running a travel agency advertising special deals for staying at home, or keeping a schedule that marks as momentous plans to go to the pantry or the garden. This notorious reclusiveness has encouraged scholarly neglect of ways that Dickinson's writing was shaped by the world beyond Amherst. Such neglect is being remedied in relation to the Civil War, an increasingly obvious influence on Dickinson's writing. No one would now repeat Thomas H. Johnson's infamous dictum that Dickinson “did not live in history and held no view of it.” Very little attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which the international spectrum of cultures and events played into her poetics. Dickinson did not write poems “about” international exchange but she was part of a community that perceived its material pleasures, republican principles, and beliefs in relation to global commerce.

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and mostly oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the post-Civil War era. The conventional account holds that realism, the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-Romantic mode, languished and stagnated. By this all too-familiar account, American poetry produced little of value between Whitman and Dickinson and the modernists. Poetry is thus almost entirely absent from scholarship on American realism except as the emblem of realism's opposite: a desiccated genteel tradition. The long life of this tale in twentieth-century criticism has afforded it, until very recently, factual status, but its core elements did not in fact arise retrospectively from an impartial scholarly distance. Rather, the twentieth-century critics who promulgated this account reproduced the elements of a story already circulating during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the pages that follow, I will trace the narrative that poetry was in its “twilight” as it emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, serving a particular ideology of poetry among elite poets and in highbrow literary periodicals; I will also argue that poetic counter-discourses in the era itself invalidate the standard narratives about postbellum poetry and its relation to realism.

Nancy Glazener has penetratingly argued that “realism” was an institutional product of a cluster of highbrow periodicals she calls “the Atlantic Group.” The “twilight of the poets” also became a lively topic circulating in this elite literary sphere. After Edmund Clarence Stedman published the term in 1885, it spread rapidly through literary culture and became an almost instant catchphrase, a sensationalist coin that writers enjoyed trading amidst their broader discussions about the degraded literary status, or status in general, of the modern era.