The Contemporary Period
The Contemporary period of American literature began in 1945. This time period includes numerous award winning authors, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead, to name a few. This guide highlights key figures and provides links for further research.
The authors listed here are a sampling of key American writers of the time period. Additional writers can be researched using the database links provided on this guide.
Databases
- Gale Literature: LitFinder This link opens in a new window
Gale Literature: LitFinder provides access to literary works and authors throughout history and includes more than 130,000 full-text poems and 650,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays. The database also includes secondary materials like biographies, images, and more. - Humanities Source Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Humanities Source Ultimate offers access to key content covering literary, scholarly, and creative thought. It also includes hundreds of scholarly full-text journals cited in leading subject indexes to round out student research.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR includes journal content, primary sources, images, and more across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
MLA International Bibliography is a detailed bibliography of journal articles, books, and dissertations from the Modern Language Association.
Perspectives
Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory
In this revised edition of Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, Michael P. Spikes adds Stanley Fish and Susan Bordo to the critics whose careers, key texts, and central assumptions he discusses in introducing readers to developments in American literary theory during the past thirty-five years. Underscoring the largely heterogeneous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics, along with Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward W. Said, and Stephen Greenblatt, represent, Spikes offers concise analyses of their principal claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism, and feminism.