"As Wheeler uses the term, containment mutes, deflects, of isolates the shocks caused by upheavals induced by WW IIe.g., the transformation of Los Angeles into an industrial powerhouse that offered both work and social status to minorities, provided that they kept their place. . . . Along with the increase in racial segregation caused by suburban expansion, Wheeler looks at how the 1950s ushered in the worst repression of gays and lesbians in US history. . . . Uncontained is thoughtfully and thoroughly researchedas its many references to literary criticism and queer theory, film techniques, and feminist history prove. And it is as gracefully written as it is erudite and inclusive, brimming with information that Wheelers clean prose style alchemizes into useful, fascinating insights."Choice

"Wheeler's conviction that diversity-racial, ethnic, gender, sexual-is constitutive of American life and literature enables her to read familiar fictions in a compelling new way."-Maureen Reddy, author of Crossing the Color Line: Race, Parenting, and Culture

World War II changed American cities and American fiction forever. Across the fictional landscape, the city was divided into segregated zones, marked by the threat of inevitable violence. In Uncontained, Elizabeth A. Wheeler critiques the divided city of dread. Examining film noir, short stories, and novels set in many American cities, Wheeler integrates tales of trauma and containment into an expansive vision of postwar America.

To the story of containment Wheeler opposes the counterstories of housewives, the Beat Generation, and the new postwar gay subcultures. Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp fiction and the paperback cult novels of Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, and Truman Capote present a vibrant new Open City. Bringing the fiction of Hisaye Yamamoto, Paule Marshall, Chester Himes, and Jo Sinclair to bear on more canonical texts, Wheeler revives the idea of urban space as a place of diversity and openness.

Elizabeth A. Wheeler is an assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon, Eugene.