Twenty-First-Century Reflections on American Voices and American Identities

Abstract

Amidst a wide variety of considerations, two primary and related themes have been foregrounded in this analysis of selected 1990s fiction. First, we have observed male and female novelists from various regions of the United States depicting male and female characters from a wide geographic and socioeconomic range using language to negotiate their relationships with each other against a backdrop of changing expectations about gender roles. Second, we have observed late-twentieth-century novelists and their fictional characters using language to define and redefine individual and communal identities against a backdrop of large social reconsiderations of race, ethnicity, heritage, and culture. We have found, in other words, continuous loops of connection between language, gender, and community, with language enabling the construction and performance of complex identities and relationships. Approaching a new century, novelists with a reputation for both popular appeal and critical acclaim have, moreover, been seen addressing some of the major issues of their day in a uniquely American way, by focusing, some might argue in a typically millennial way, on the individual and the needs of the individual self.