Summary: Publisher Summary 1 Late Postmodernismidentifies and describes the work of a new generation of innovative American novelists in relation to the contemporary institutions and ideologies of literature.   Publisher Summary 2 Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority, and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade--including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers--Late Postmodernismexamines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in the culture.   Publisher Summary 3 Late Postmodernism identifies and describes the work of a new generation of innovative American novelists in relation to the contemporary institutions and ideologies of literature.