Postmodern Realist Fiction: Resisting Master Narratives 1960-2020. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Introduces postmodernist fiction that addresses income inequality, immigration, the environmental crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting sex-gender roles, the rise of new forms of authoritarianism and other related social issues. Discusses more than 40 writers from a diverse range of class, gender, and ethnic/racial backgrounds.

 

The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Present. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019 [2nd edition]. A history of U.S. social movements from the 1950s to the present -- women's, civil rights, Black Power/Black Lives Matter, Chicanx, Native American, environmental, Occupy, ACT-UP and more -- focusing on roles played by various art forms (music, murals. poetry, puppetry, film, novels, etc.) in shaping social change. 

 

 

Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era. NY and London: Routledge Press, 2019 [2nd edition]). Surveys the positive and negative impact of digital culture on education, sexuality, politics, gender and ethnic identity, and host of other issues.

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Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left: A Northwest Writer Reworks American Fiction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Uses Cantwell, a brilliant but largely forgotten author, as a case study to reexamine the radical or proletarian literary movement of the Depression era and its aftermath and a nuanced understanding of class dynamics in US fiction.

 

 

Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Book arguing for “postmodern realism” as a theory of literary, cultural and political production entwined with “new social movement” struggles.