ABSTRACT
It is a feature of the process of canonisation that, at a certain point, the word ‘early’ is introduced to bracket a number of works by the author who is being canonised. So, as DeLillo enters the academic marketplace as a major contemporary writer in the wake of White Noise, critics turn to a number of his novels and suggest that they have been written by ‘early DeLillo’. Which novels are placed in this bracket depends upon how the emerging oeuvre is divided up. Perhaps the six novels up to and including Running Dog, all written during the 1970s, might be thought of as his early period. Then we might hazard that the string of novels written through the 1980s and the 1990s, and which culminate in Underworld, could be thought of as his middle period. Perhaps, in this scenario, The Body Artist, first published in 2001, might be thought of as the introduction to a late DeLillo, a DeLillo whose boundaries we have yet to imagine, and who addresses himself to a century and a millennium which remains so far unrevealed to us.
