Marilynne Robinson

This chapter outlines Marilynne Robinson’s opposition to the ‘postmodern types’ of her literary generation while also critiquing the willingness of critics and reviewers to assign the style and concerns of her writing to the past. It considers the relationship between the rural setting of Robinson’s fiction and her characters’ engagement with history. Robinson’s novel, Gilead, was published twenty-four years after Housekeeping when the author was sixty-one-years-old. She insists on her intensely intellectual relationship with what might commonly be perceived as the ‘flyover’ states of America. Robinson’s commitment to taking the long-view of American politics and pointedly distancing herself from contemporary movements may be changing. According to Robinson, the town of Gilead is the fictional ‘offspring’ of Tabor and through the memories and stories of three generations of the Ames family, the Gilead novels contrast Iowa’s radical past with the generalised political disengagement associated, however simplistically, with the 1950s.