How can university faculty and librarians help students and scholars think critically about contemporary social issues? Connect them to fiction from emerging authors.

Emerging literature, or twenty-first-century literature, includes literary works published in this century. Grappling with modern themes like technology and global crises, emerging authors are capturing the story of the twenty-first century and ruminating on the future.

Gale believes the study of emerging authors is essential to understanding the global human experience and the effects of modern history. With a vast array of primary sources, literary criticisms, reviews, and more, Gale Literature Resource Center supports research of emerging authors and emerging literature.

Gale Literature Resource Center Highlights

In Gale Literature Resource Center, researchers can find up-to-date analysis, biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, original works of literature, and reviews on more than 160,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world.

  • The database includes more than 2,100,000 full-text articles, critical essays, and reviews from over 450 scholarly journals and literary magazines. 
  • Daily content updates provide researchers with the most-current critical approaches and interpretations of authors and works, book reviews, and more.
  • Coverage of a diverse range of writers with a broad array of disciplines, time periods, and backgrounds from around the world delivers a full picture of representation in literature.
  • Primary works in a variety of genres—from science fiction writers, essayists, poets, and others—support close reading and the gathering of textual evidence to provide ample opportunity for reader-response activities. 
  • Materials support interdisciplinary approaches to the humanities, information literacy, and the development of critical-thinking skills.
  • Current and comprehensive literature criticism, biographical information, reviews, and references promote deeper literary understanding.

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Featured Authors: 21st-Century Literature

Among the thousands of primary sources, criticisms, and articles in Gale Literature Resource Center include works examining the following twenty-first-century authors:

  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Sherman Alexie
  • Svetlana Alexievich
  • Isabel Allende
  • Margaret Atwood
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Elena Ferrante
  • Jonathan Franzen
  • Neil Gaiman
  • Malcolm Gladwell
  • Stephen King
  • Yiyun Li
  • Hilary Mantel
  • George R. R. Martin
  • Ian McEwan
  • Haruki Murakami
  • George Saunders
  • Zadie Smith
  • Donna Tartt
  • Colson Whitehead

Want to explore all that Gale Literature Resource Center has to offer?

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Resource Spotlight:

From “Introduction: Imagining Crisis in Twenty-First Century American Literature and Media” (Studies in the Literary Imagination; Vol. 50, Issue 2)

“The collection of articles gathered in this thematic issue is the second of a two-issue volume exploring crisis narratives in the twenty-first-century United States: Twenty-First-Century American Crises: Reflections, Representations, Transformations. Issue one (SLI, vol. 50, no. 1, Spring 2017) focused on the representation of historical crisis narratives, memorialization, and the examination of migrant traces in museums. It also highlighted the role of civil actors and social movements whose actions are currently revitalizing urban and rural spaces across the nation, such as Native American water protectors and Black Lives Matter. Finally, it considered fictional interventions that have explored human and post-human relations after catastrophe within the literary domain. Looking for crisis symptoms and symbols beyond the nation and also within itself, issue two complements the first set of contributions, focusing instead on literary and media responses to the new crisis scenarios that are redefining the American narrative imagination in the new millennium. The representations of crisis that are tackled in this second issue are broad in genre and scope, as they include recent novels, plays, films, and also TV series, but they all share a central idea: contemporary crises cross into the personal and the collective threads of national preoccupations and more intimate manifestations of such crises. Additionally, these literary and media texts engage feelings of bereavement, environmental destruction, racism, male-abuse, and xenophobia while they strategically open creative sites of struggle and resistance through unexpected gestures, symbols, and spaces.”

 

Reference
Brígido-Corachán, Anna M., and Ana Fernández-Caparrós. “Introduction: Imagining Crisis in Twenty-First Century American Literature and Media.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 50, no. 2 (2017): v+. Gale Literature Resource Center, accessed September 30, 2022.