N arrative since World War II resists generalization: It is extremely various and multifaceted. It has been vitalized by international currents such as European existentialism and Latin American magical realism, while the electronic era has brought the global village. The spoken word on television has given new life to oral tradition. Oral genr‚s, media, and popular culture have increasingly influenced narrative.

In the past, elite culture influenced popular culture through its status and example; the reverse seems true in the United States today. Serious novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Alice Walker, and E. L. Doctorow have borrowed from and commented on comics, movies, fashions, songs, and oral history.

To say this is not to trivialize recent literature: Writers in the United States are asking serious questions, many of them of a metaphysical nature. Writers have become highly innovative and self-aware, or "reflexive." Often they find traditional modes ineffective and seek vitality in more widely popular material. To put it another way: American writers, in recent decades, have developed a post-modern sensibility. Modernist restructurings of point of view no longer suffice for them: Rather, the context of vision must be made new.

• WRITERS OF FICTION

THe first important fiction writers widely recognized today, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper, used American subjects, historical perspectives, themes of change, and nostalgic tones. They wrote in many prose genres, initiated new forms, and found new ways to make a living through literature. With them, American

• Today readers and critics normally have…

410 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 The Realist novel 4ii The present chapter discusses the traditions and versions of the Realist art rejected by the Modernists and their heirs. Spanish Realism at its best finds what is universal and eternal in humankind through personages confronting the accidents and issues of human

• However, as the eighteenth century ended, a variety…

Though Neoclassical aesthetic principles and practices continued to be advocated for over a century after Luza´n’s trailblazing text, they did little to diminish the appeal of popular drama, which flourished in spite of the absence of explicit theoretical underpinning.5 What the aesthetic debates made evident was the diversity of tastes

• But sudden and brilliant imaginative phenomena…

Lydgate’s following at court gave him a central place in 15th-century literary life, but the typical concerns shown by his verse do not distinguish it from a great body of religious, moral, historical, and didactic writing, much of it 70 THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD Prolifc 14th-century court poet John Lydgate wrote largely with

• A good official definition of it reads as follows: Socialist…

If the year which begins this period - 1925 - has both literary and political significance, as the year when the newly established communist regime asserted its authority over literature and culture, the ending date is primarily of political significance: it is the year of Joseph Stalin's death. A political