Modern American Fiction: The Novel of Terror

The book offers a new perspective of modern American fiction. The gothic as genre mapping the terrors of deracination and dispossession has attracted special creative and critical attention in the post war American literary milieu. Gothicism has become a significant strand of American writing today owing to its flexibility of form and content, due to which it has been able to appropriate the darker side of the American myth and accommodate the sinister truths and irreconcilable paradoxes of the modern American experience. The book, by incorporating suppressed voices and marginalized narratives, attempts to probe the widely echoed fear of the mutation of the American Dream into a nightmare. The postmodern preoccupation with conflicting, multi-voiced discourses of power and desire finds an expression here. It thus attempts to elucidate how modern American gothic fiction, far from being an escapist mode of writing, strives to perceive, assimilate and portray the sociology of terror rampant in the American society, and chart the trauma of the psyche trapped amidst the brutality and terror endemic to American life.