Contested Terrain by Keith Wilhite

Contested Terrain by Keith Wilhite

Contested Terrain explores suburban literature between two moments of domestic crisis: the housing shortage that gave rise to the modern era of suburbanization after World War II, and the mortgage defaults and housing foreclosures that precipitated the Great Recession. Moving away from scholarship that highlights the alienating, placeless quality of suburbia, Wilhite argues that we should reimagine suburban literature as part of a long literary tradition of U.S. regional writing that connects the isolation and exclusivity of the domestic realm to the expansionist ideologies of U.S. nationalism and the environmental imperialism of urban sprawl. Wilhite produces new, unexpected readings of works by Sinclair Lewis, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Yates, Patricia Highsmith, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-rae Lee, Richard Ford, Jung Yun, and Patrick Flanery. Contested Terrain demonstrates how postwar suburban nation-building ushered in an informal geography that recalibrated notions of national identity, democratic citizenship, and domestic security to the scale of the single-family home.

Keith Wilhite is associate professor of English at Siena College. He is editor of The City Since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television. Wilhite lives in Albany, New York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781609388577
ISBN 10	1609388577
Title	Contested Terrain
Author	Keith Wilhite
Series	New American Canon
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Iowa Press
Year published	2022-12-30
Number of pages	310
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.