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This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of passing. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction.
The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Phillip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty, by arguing meta-critical and meta-fictional tool. These writers are attracted to the trope of passing because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of “black” subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship.
Aimed at students and researchers, it promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between passing, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction.
1. Introduction: ‘Passing’ into the present: passing narratives then and now
2. Living parchments, human documents: passing, racial identity and the literary
marketplace
3. The way of the cross(-dresser): Catholicism, gender and race in two novels by Louise Erdrich
4. (W)Rites-of-passing: shifting racial and gender identities in Caucasia and Middlesex
5. Bodies / texts: passing and writing in The White Boy Shuffle and The Human Stain
6. Conclusion: ‘Passing’ fads?: recent controversies of authenticity and authorship
Bibliography
Index