BiblioVault - Books about Modern American Fiction

The Forsaken Son

Child Murder and Atonement in Modern American Fiction

Joshua Pederson

Northwestern University Press, 2015

The Forsaken Son engages the provocative coincidence of the vocabularies of infanticide and Christianity, specifically atonement theology, in six modern American novels: Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, the first two installments of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Joyce Carol Oates’s My Sister, My Love, and Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.

Christian atonement theology explains why God lets His son be crucified. Yet in recent years, as an increasing number of scholars have come to reject that explanation, the cross reverts from saving grace to trauma—or even crime. More bluntly, without atonement, the cross may be a filicide, in which God forces his son to die for no apparent reason. Pederson argues that the novels about child murder mentioned above likewise give voice to modern skepticism about traditional atonement theology.

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Textual Contraception

Birth Control and Modern American Fiction

Beth Widmaier Capo

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Between the 1910s and 1940s, American women fought for and won the right to legal birth control. This battle was fought in the courts, in the media, and in the pages of American literature. Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction examines the relationship between aesthetic production and political activism in the birth control movement. It concludes that, by dramatically bringing to life the rhetorical issues, fiction played a significant role in shaping public consciousness. Concurrently, the potential for female control inherent in contraception influenced literary technique and reception, supporting new narrative possibilities for female characters beyond marriage and motherhood.

Merging cultural analysis and literary scholarship, this compelling work moves from a consideration of how cultural forces shaped literary production and political activism to a close examination of how fictional representations of contraception influenced the terms of public discourse on marriage, motherhood, economics, and eugenics.

By analyzing popular fiction such as Mother by Kathleen Norris, radical periodicals such as The Masses and Birth Control Review, and literature by authors from Theodore Dreiser to William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen to Mary McCarthy, Beth Widmaier Capo reveals the rich cross-influence of contraceptive and literary history.

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Writing Through Writer's Block

Lessons from Modern American Fiction

Aaron Colton

University of Iowa Press, 2025

Recent fiction is teeming with blocked writers: from John Updike’s Henry Bech to Stephen King’s Paul Sheldon and Mike Noonan. From David Foster Wallace’s Mark Nechtr to the autofictional figures of Jordan Castro, Salvador Plascencia, Nam Le, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Andrew Martin. Writing Through Writer’s Block offers the first book-length analysis of the archetype of the blocked writer. From the scenes of writer’s block enacted in these fictions, we gather pedagogical lessons that are germane to writers of all kinds—creative and academic, advanced and novice—and particularly useful for the growing contingency of faculty whose teaching responsibilities lie in both literature and academic writing.

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