Epochal anxieties and fixations: millennial angst in Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama (1998), and J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes (2000)

This study reads four contemporary novels as both responses to and engagements with the cultural climate of the late twentieth-century. Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama (1998), and J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes (2000) all gesture toward an interrogation of the value system of late-twentieth century life and an indictment of the cultural sphere. I employ the term ‘epochal anxiety’ to map the culturally specific phenomena that these novels internalise and reflect. Taking into account recent scholarly conversation on literature of the 1990s, this study will also consider the temporal significance of the texts in light of their proximity to the events of September 11.