Introduction: the inevitable intimate connection -- Part 1. Liberal modernism and transnationalism: Naming what is inside: Gertrude Stein's use of names in Three lives; John Dos Passos's imaginary city in Manhattan transfer; Faulkner and the Southern arts of mystification in Absalom, absalom!; our invisible man: the aesthetic genealogy of U.S. diversity -- Part 2. Postwar liberalism and the new cosmopolitanism: Racism, fetishism, and the gift economy in Harper Lee's To kill a mockingbird; alien encounter: Thomas Berger's Neighbors as a critique of existential humanism; buried alive: the Native American political unconscious in Louise Erdrich's fiction; neoliberalism and the U.S. literary canon: the example of Philip Roth
