Character Networks in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

A defining shift in 21st-century American culture has been the visibility of our social networks. Our vocabulary for understanding politics and culture is now saturated with terms describing patterns of positioning and group dynamics, such as jobseeker networking, reach, going viral, grassroots networks, and partisan bubbles. Contemporary novelists are shrewd observers of the "LinkedIn lunatics," "Columbuses," leakers, and others that reflect a shifting landscape of values in the network society. Character Networks in Contemporary U.S. Fiction reads this historical context alongside social network analysis and narrative theory, in order to argue that novelists, too, model complex social networks. To this end, Scott Selisker develops methods for illustrating and interpreting such "character networks," which comprise character groupings, go-betweens, unlikely encounters, and surprise realignments. Selisker reveals that many concepts in popular criticism, from the Bechdel test to sidekicks of color and manic pixie dream girls, describe characters in terms of their network positioning.