Description: Treating groups that are disadvantaged or disempowered whether by circumstance of gender, race, or sexual orientation, the American writers from the '30s to the '50s profiled here occupy the cusp between the modern and the postmodern; between the recognizably modernist aesthetic of alienation and the fragmented, disordered sensibility of post modernism.
Review Quotes: "Highly recommended for all academic libraries."--Choice
"Phillip Brian Harper's book is the most cogent move yet in literary criticism to revise what is, by now, a canonical version of postmodernism. In arguing for the anticipation of postmodernism's themes by writers excluded from centrality within the modernist tradition, his study gives true social depth and historical meaning to the often rote usage of terms like `marginality' and `minority.'"--Andrew Ross, New York University"Framing the Margins is an unusually lucid book of scholarship, understated but arresting. Any reader of contemporary literature will be challenged by Harper's ideas, and all parties involved in the `culture wars' should heed his voice."--Harvard Review"Framing the Margins is a bold contribution to the re-evaluation of twentieth century American cultural evolution."--Journal of American Studies"Harper's book seeks at once to broaden our understanding of the postmodern condition and to make our discussion of it more complex and specific....In the breadth of its readings and the rigor of its argument, Framing the Margins is one of the most illuminating books on postmodernism that I have read..."--Papers on Language and Literature