William T. Vollmann: Writing America’s Other Histories

Writing America’s Other Histories is the first book-length study of the vast range of work produced by William T. Vollmann, relating his fiction to his ground-breaking studies of class, gender, and warfare. His work is discussed in relation to literary modes such as auto-ethnography, auto-fiction, and New Journalism, since his quasi-ethnographic interviews with poor people, sex-workers, and combatants and civilians in war-zones, are guided by a belief in the political value of personal testimony.

Vollmann also builds on the techniques of historiographic metafiction to challenge how different cultures are represented, refining the process through collaborative work with anthropologists and native informants. This book therefore outlines a theory of ’ethnographic metafiction’ as a praxis epitomised by Vollmann; in particular, in the Seven Dreams series which focuses on historic encounters between European settlers and Native Americans, using their myths and poetics to show how colonisation is not simply an event but the imposition of a structure of power-relations.

The interrogation of American identity is central yet Vollmann is alert to global concerns and global traditions more than most. He draws on, and therefore helps us to rethink, Surrealism, Magic Realism, and a range of (post)modernisms. Due to the complexity of his work, he has been praised by numerous authors (not least, David Foster Wallace) and theorists (such as Larry McCaffery and Steven Moore) but few have articulated his achievement, making this an essential contribution to discourse on ’post- or late-postmodernism’ for students, lecturers, and researchers alike.