Introduction

This book is an experiment in critical cartography: its contributors have taken up the difficult challenge of mapping key literary trends as the landscape and perhaps even the underlying geology of our century continue to take shape around us. This is an intellectually precarious undertaking. Both the territory and its charting will change rapidly over the next eighty years: some of the fictional trends identified in this volume will solidify as others erode, and critical directions and interests will shift. If literature is still studied by the century’s end, perhaps only some of the authors, texts, and themes covered in these 38 chapters will orient future generations of scholars: others, possibly all, may have vanished into the obscurity of paths not taken.