Jennifer Egan, New Sincerity, and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article traces a development in Jennifer Egan’s literary ethos across her career: from a worry about the negative effects of popular genre conventions in her early fiction to a dedicated embrace, in her most recent work, of genre writing and of realist fiction as itself a genre. I situate Egan’s development in the context of a shift in the American literary field more generally, from the moment of literary New Sincerity in the 1990s and early 2000s to the much remarked-upon “genre turn” in literary fiction since the mid-2000s. I argue that Egan’s work allows us to see how New Sincerity laid the ground for the genre turn and to understand this process of literary change in its aesthetic, economic, political, and gendered dimensions.