This module covers American fiction written in the twentieth and early 21st century and considers how American writers relate to literary and social aspects of American life and culture. The module also considers how writers interrogate and overturn canonical ideas of ‘America’ as cultural identity by studying a mixture of canonical and lesser-known American fiction writers alongside each other. Topics covered will include: America’s global relations; American citizenship and race/legacies of slavery; American modernism; the Great Depression; postwar anxieties and the Cold War; American approaches to gender and sexuality; paranoia and conspiracy; regional writing; the 1990s and the ‘end of history’.