Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel

The "Blank Fiction" of young American writers such as Dennis Cooper, Lynne Tillman, Bret Easton Ellis and Susanna Moore represents a shift away from the postwar obsession with dense plots, political subject matter and academic philosophizing. These writers appear to value superficiality over complexity, mass culture over high culture and youth over experience. In the first scholarly critique of blank fiction, James Annesley assesses a wide range of recent American writing and identifies their principal unifying characteristics. Challenging conventional postmodernist approaches, Annesley reveals the dynamic of blank writing to be tied to the dominant economic forces of contemporary capitalism. This contextual analysis concentrates on the relationship between blank fiction and consumerism and positions the writing within currents of contemporary American culture. This is a welcome and much-needed introduction to a new direction in contemporary literature.