American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction Since 1960

By Kathryn Hume

Book Overview

In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream.

In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo.

Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life.
The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252070577
• ISBN13: 9780252070570
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Interpreting American Dream, American Nightmare

This is a fantastic book. Very few critics have the courage or the eyeball power to do what Kathryn Hume has done--offer a genuinely thorough discussion of the landscape of American fiction since 1960--over 100 books discussed. Anyone who wants to educate her/himself on postwar fiction ought to get a copy of this wonderfully written book. No creepy academic jargon, lots of intelligent comparison. Also, Hume offers a politically progressive review but is never (pinch my nose) politically correct.