American Studies after Postmodernism

This book explores the major challenges that the long-standing and diversely debated demise of postmodernism signifies for American literature, art, culture, history, and politics, in the present, third decade of the twenty-first century. Its scope comprises a vigorous discussion of all these diverse fields undertaken by distinguished scholars as well as junior researchers, U.S. Americanists and European Americanists alike. Focusing on socio-political and cultural developments in the contemporary U.S., their contributions highlight the interconnectedness of the geopolitical, economic, environmental and technological crises that define the historical present on global scale. Theodora Tsimpouki is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Her teaching and research interests focus on American realism, modernism and postmodern fiction, the 1960s, urbanliterature and theories of space, posthumanism. She is the author and editor of several books and articles in the field of American literature and culture and co- chief editors of Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Literature, Culture, and Media. Konstantinos Blatanis is Associate Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is the author of Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama (2003) and co-editor of the volume War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (2017). His research interests and publications are in the fields of American literature, American drama and theater, popular culture, media studies, and critical theory. Angeliki Tseti specializes on word-image interactions and has published articles on photo-literature in peer-reviewed academic journals and academic volumes. Her research interests include trauma and memory studies, genocide and film. She has taught American literature and culture courses at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her work also includes the translation and editing of Liliane Louvel's book The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism (2018). Chapter 16 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.