This is a comprehensive study of the first decade of literary representations of 9/11, moving from Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2003) to Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2012). It traces the way literature has dealt with an event that continues to shape world conflict and resonate prominently in the American imagination, and argues that the corpus of literary fiction discussing 9/11 is characterized by a fundamental sense of conflictedness related to the tensions between trauma or mourning and political imperatives. The work offers in-depth analyses of texts that have historicized 9/11 and shaped the way we understand this key moment in American and world history.

Arin Keeble is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. He has published widely on contemporary fiction, television, disaster and terrorism.

Arin Keeble

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 216
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7834-7
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1562-2
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments    vi
Preface    1
Introduction: A Conflicted Homeland    3
One “The New Normal” in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers 17
Two Windows on the World and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Crisis in Representation? 40
Three Marriage, Relationships and 9/11: The Seismographic Narratives of Falling Man, The Good Life and The Emperor’s Children 69
Four The Road: Disaster, Allegory and the Exhaustion of the Early 9/11 Novel 92
Five First World National Allegory and Otherness in The Reluctant Fundamentalist 115
Six Netherland and 9/11 Meta-Fiction 139
Seven The Multidirectional Memorialization of 9/11 in Amy Waldman’s The Submission 165
Conclusion    188
Notes    195
Bibliography    197
Index    205