ABSTRACT
This chapter explores David Cowart's scheme with the occasional wry additions of Brian McHale and Amy Hungerford. It also explores the work of two significant American women writers—Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston—both of them ghettoized from the beginning of their writing careers. In 1988 Michael Chabon published his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; in 1989, so too did Maxine Hong Kingston, when Tripmaster Monkey, her first novel, appeared. Morrison and Doctorow were born in 1931; Maxine Hong Kingston was born in 1940. Doctorow's writing was not postmodern in any oppositional sense: it rather took the most humane strains of story and wove them into what Brian McHale called, after Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson, historiographic metafiction. Both Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson chose to write extensive commentaries on Doctorow's work during the mid-1970s, making Ragtime an apparently perfect illustration of postmodernism.
