
New Sincerity
American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age
Adam Kelly(Author)
Stanford University Press
Published on 8. October 2024
Book
Hardback
386 pages
978-1-5036-4026-9 (ISBN)
Description
The years 1989-2008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post*45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these years-specifically the post-baby boom generation of writers born between the late 1950s and early 1970s-responded to the times by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity. How, and in what way, these writers ask, can you mean what you say, and avow what you feel, when what you say and feel can be bought and sold on the market? What is authentic art in a historical moment when the artist has become a model for neoliberal subjectivity rather than its negation? Through six chapters focused on key writers of the period-including Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallace-the book explores these central questions while intervening critically in a set of debates in contemporary literary studies concerning aesthetics, economy, gender, race, class, and politics. Offering the capstone articulation of a set of influential arguments made by the author over a decade and more, New Sincerity constitutes a field-defining account of a period that is simultaneously recent and historically bound, and of a generation of writers who continue to shape the literary landscape of the present.
Reviews / Votes
"For well over a decade, my conversations with Adam Kelly have made a vibrant addition to my writing life, both strengthening my awareness of my literary context and helping me to define-and even understand-what I'm trying to do."-Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House "Adam Kelly is one of the liveliest and most exciting thinkers around."
-Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting "Kelly is a major voice in the scholarly conversation on contemporary US fiction. This book is both a lucid summary and a brilliant further development of his important arguments about New Sincerity aesthetics."
-Lee Konstantinou, University of Maryland, College Park "New Sincerity is a blockbuster, the deepest account we have of the complex ethical orientation of a whole generation of US writers to neoliberal capitalism. Kelly ably revivifies the literary period immediately preceding our own in all its conflicted glory."
-Mark McGurl, Stanford University "New Sincerity provides a compelling framework for understanding millennial American literature. Kelly traces a generation's commitment to sincerity in its fiction and culture, while revealing its failures to wholly escape the market values and dictates it contests."
-Ralph Clare, Boise State University "This groundbreaking book is riveting to read, philosophically sophisticated, and politically insightful. Equally sensitive to the historical and the aesthetic, the economic and the existential, Kelly sets a new standard for the expressive power of literary criticism."
-Martin Haegglund, Yale University "Kelly... handles a big literary movement, complex political and economic ideas, and a dozen prominent authors in a conversational style that centers his love of reading in ways academic writing typically fails to do. His book is an exciting conversation that tempts the reader to drop everything and re-enroll as an undergrad."-Michael Maiello, Washington Independent Review of Books "As the first book-length survey of 'the new sincerity' in American literature, this study fills a significant gap between the peak of postmodernism and the later genre turn in the historicist consideration of early 21st-century American fiction. Kelly deftly embeds insightful and extended commentaries on works by an array of writers... within a rich and sprawling critical discourse about literary sincerity that hearkens back to Lionel Trilling (among others) as well as the potential roles that literary art can play in an age dominated by cultural and political neoliberalism.... Highly recommended."-D. C. Maus, CHOICE "Kelly is successful in drawing a 'generational portrait' of how American fiction developed between the end of the Reagan presidency and the 2008 financial crisis."-Zach Gibson, Los Angeles Review of Books
More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Palo Alto
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Cloth
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
680 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5036-4026-9 (9781503640269)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
10/2024
Stanford University Press
€67.99
Available for download
Person
Adam Kelly is Associate Professor of English, University College Dublin, Ireland.
Content
Introduction
1. Achieving the Art of Sincerity
2. New Economy, New Sincerity
3. Gendered Histories and Novel Genres
4. Freedom Struggle, Class Struggle, Sincerity Struggle
5. Seeing Like a Neoliberal
6. The Politics of Sincerity and the Sincerity of Politics
Conclusion: Sincerity in Common
1. Achieving the Art of Sincerity
2. New Economy, New Sincerity
3. Gendered Histories and Novel Genres
4. Freedom Struggle, Class Struggle, Sincerity Struggle
5. Seeing Like a Neoliberal
6. The Politics of Sincerity and the Sincerity of Politics
Conclusion: Sincerity in Common