9/11 Fiction, Empathy, and Otherness analyzes recent works of fiction whose principal subject is the attacks of September 11, 2001. The readings of the novels question and assess the validity and potential effectiveness of both the subsequent calls for a cosmopolitan outlook and the related, but no less significant, emphasis placed on empathy, and exhibited in such recent studies as Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization, Karsten Stueber's Rediscovering Empathy, and Julinna Oxley's The Moral Dimensions of Empathy. As such, this study examines the extent to which "us" and "them" narratives proliferated after 9/11, and the degree to which calls for greater empathy and a renewed emphasis on cosmopolitan values served to counterbalance an apparent movement towards increased polarization, encapsulated in the oft-mentioned "clash of civilizations." A principal objective of the book is thus to examine the ethical and political implications revealed in the exercising or withholding of empathy. For though empathy, in and of itself, may not be sufficient, it is nevertheless a vital component in the generation of actions one might identify as cosmopolitan. In other words, this book examines the responses to 9/11 (in both Western and non-Western novels) in order to uncover what their dramatic renderings might tell us about the possibility of a truly globalized community. The attainability of any cosmopolitan engagement is contingent upon our abilities to understand the other, knowing always that otherness eludes our grasp, and the best we can do is imagine some version of it. It is primarily in this capacity that the novel has a role to play. Whether it is the challenge of connecting with the survivors of trauma and the inhabitants of a traumatized city, or with a hyperpower that has experienced its own vulnerability for the first time, or even with the terrorist who seeks to commit violent acts, these novels afford us the means of examining the complex dynamics involved in any exhibition of fellow-feeling for the other, and the ever-present potential failure of that engagement.

This book argues that twenty-first-century neorealist fiction is inspired by political and journalistic discourses and, along with them, constitutes one of the many representations of the attacks on September 11 and their outcomes. Adopting a neorealist stance, this book is placed at the intersection of realism and fiction, with often reference to what is perceived as objective writing (media and political texts), not at all so divorced from the practice of literary writings on the event that shook the world on September 11, 2001.

Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity, edited by Dunja M. Mohr and Birgit Däwes, explores the intersections between narrative disruption and continuity in post-9/11 narratives from an interdisciplinary transnational perspective, foregrounding the transatlantic cultural memory of 9/11. Contesting the earlier notion of a cataclysm that has changed ‘everything,’ and critically reflecting on American exceptionalism, the collection offers an inquiry into what has gone unchanged in terms of pre-9/11, post-9/11, and post-post-9/11 issues and what silences persist. How do literature and performative and visual arts negotiate this precarious balance of a pervasive discourse of change and emerging patterns of political, ideological, and cultural continuity?

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers’ reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans’ stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a twelve-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction, written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the 'literary' novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, and tendencies. This book offers an account of US fiction during a period demarcated by two traumatic moments: the eve of the entry of the United States into the Second World War and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The aftermath of the Second World War was arguably the high point of US nationalism, but in the years that followed, US writers would increasingly explore the possibility that US democracy was a failure, both at home and abroad. For so many of the writers whose work this volume explores, the idea of "nation" became suspect as did the idea of "national literature" as the foundation for US writing. Looking at post-1940s writing, the literary historian might well chart a movement within literary cultures away from nationalism and toward what we would call "cosmopolitanism," a perspective that fosters conversations between the occupants of different cultural spaces and that regards difference as an opportunity to be embraced rather than a problem to be solved. During this period, the novel has had significant competition for the US public's attention from other forms of narrative and media: film, television, comic books, videogames, and the internet and the various forms of social media that it spawned. If, however, the novel becomes a "residual" form during this period, it is by no means archaic. The novel has been reinvigorated over the past eighty years by its encounters with both emergent forms (such as film, television, comic books, and digital media) and the emergent voices typically associated with multiculturalism in the United States.

This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the speculative can become difficult to discern. To elucidate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. As turn-of-the-century writers such as Stevenson and Conrad were the first to point out, this gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and cinema, this study explores the complex interplay between actual incidents of political violence, the surrounding discourse, and fictional engagement with the issue to show how terrorism becomes an object of fantasy. Drawing on research from a variety of disciplines, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism will be a valuable resource for those with interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Terrorism Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies.

Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sites—shaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace. In works of literature, film, and television, the city emerges as a paradoxical space of permanence and vulnerability and a convergence point for anxieties about globalization, structural inequality, and apocalyptic violence. Building on previous scholarship addressing trauma and the spectacle of terror, the contributors also draw upon works of philosophy, urban studies, and postmodern geography to theorize how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins. Their essays advance new lines of argument that clarify art’s role in contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. The book offers fresh readings of familiar post-9/11 novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, but it also considers works by Teju Cole, Joseph O’Neill, Silver Krieger, Colum McCann, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, William Gibson, Amitav Ghosh, and Katherine Boo. In addition, The City Since 9/11 includes essays on the films Children of Men, Hugo, and the adaptation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, chapters on the television series The Bridge, The Killing, and The Wire, and an analysis of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence and the 9/11 Memorial.