The Post-9/11 Great American Novel: Fictional Perpetuations of White American Trauma and Islamophobia
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
The Post-9/11 Great American Novel: Fictional Perpetuations of White American Trauma and Islamophobia
By (Author) Dr. or Prof. Sheheryar Sheikh
Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Bloomsbury Publishing USA
13th November 2025
United States
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Literary studies: from c 2000
Physical Properties
Hardback
240
Width 152mm, Height 229mm
Description
A study of the confluences between liberal white Americans trauma, their reverting to hyper-conservative Islamophobia, and Don DeLillos call to American authors that they compose a new so-called Great American Novel pluriverse in the wake of 9/11.
In December 2001, Don DeLillo urged American writers to create the counternarrative that would reclaim control of culture in a call for nation-rebuilding fiction that mirrors John William de Forests original post-Civil War coinage of the term and concept of the Great American Novel. Through this conceptual framework, Sheheryar Sheikh examines four major post-9/11 works to demonstrate a concerted effort by these authors to address the Muslim Question in novels that feature and critique traumatized white Americans creating mechanisms with which to mitigate the trauma of 9/11 as it resurges at even the thought of Muslims existing in America after 9/11.
By looking at repression, appropriation, adversarial othering, and enforced secularization as they appear in Jonathan Safran Foers Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, John Updikes Terrorist, DeLillos Falling Man, and Amy Waldmans The Submission, this study shows the iterations of solutions and the abandonment of these ideals by traumatized white liberals. While the original concept of the Great American Novel featured fluid and multifaceted explorations of the American Dream, The Post-9/11 Great American Novel shows how this renewed interest in creating nation-rebuilding texts threatened to stagnate and calcify this literary form. Specifically, because these texts primarily congeal around the occlusion of Muslims and Islam within and from the United States.
Author Bio
Sheheryar B. Sheikh is Assistant Professor and Donald Hill Family Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University, Canada, where he teaches creative writing. He has published two novels with HarperCollins India, The Still Point of the Turning World (2017) and Call Me Al: The Heros Ha-Ha Journey (2019), both of which have been finalists for the All-Pakistan Getz Pharma prize.
