The program era Postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing

Employing engaging prose rare in scholarly books, McGurl (UCLA) offers an account of the emergence of creative writing in the American university system from the 1930s on, and of the intricate relationship between that system and postwar American fiction during its passage from modernism to postmodernism and beyond. Along the way, he provides intermittent, useful discussion of the culture and society that shaped and was shaped by the new fiction. The titles of the seven chapters do not fully reveal the contents of the book, which also touches on, for example, the aesthetics of new criticism and the voice-oriented, identity-emphasizing fictions of the 1960s-70s, when the burgeoning creative writing schools nurtured many women and minority writers. McGurl discusses an impressive number of writers, including but not limited to Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Charles Johnson, Thomas Pynchon, and Thomas Wolfe (now rarely taught). He uses scholarship well, drawing on such important texts as Ashraf Rushdy's Neo-Slave Narratives (CH, Apr'00, 37-4355), Michael Szalay's New Deal Modernism (CH, Jun'01, 38-5470), and William Paulson's prescient The Noise of Culture (1988). Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. American literature collections, all colleges and universities. K. Tololyan Wesleyan University