Narrative since World War II resists generalization Extremely varied & multifaceted Vitalized by European existentialism & Latin

in American magic realism Oral genres, media & popular culture have increasingly influenced narrative Serious novelists borrowed form & commented on comics, movies, fashions, songs & oral history

 American writers are asking serious questions Writers have become highly innovative & self aware Post-modern sensibility has been developed

 The 1940s saw the flourishing of the new contingent of writers including Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller etc. They all explored fate of the individual within the family or community & focused on the balance between personal growth & responsibility to the group

 The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization & technology in every day life 1950s provided Americans with the long awaited material prosperity Business seemed to offer the good life with its markers of success car, home, television & home appliances Yet loneliness was the dominant theme The faceless corporate man became a cultural stereotype

 The alienation & stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in in the 1960s in Civil Rights Movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism A blurring of the line between fiction & fact, novels & reportage that has carried through the present day New Journalism: combined with techniques of fiction, reshaping facts to add to the drama of the story being reported Contemporary literature flowed with the turbulence of the era

 By the mid 1970s, an era of consolidation began Vietnam war was over In 1980s, the Me Decade, the individual tended to focus more on personal concerns than on larger social issues In literature the force behind pure experimentation dwindled Concern with setting, character & themes associated with realism returned

 Daring structures like a novel within a nvel were presented Minority literature began to flourish Drama shifted from realism to more cinematic techniques Ethnic groups like Asian-Americans & Hispanic Americans took their place on the scene

The New Regionalism

Regionalism made a triumphant return in the last decade of the 20th c. Prevalent in popular fiction such as detective stories as well as in classical forms Budding talents surface anywhere in this world of mass media

 American literature has traversed an extended, winding path from pre-colonial to contemporary times Society, history, technology have had a strong impact on it