Blank fiction is a term that describes the writing of a generation of contemporary US writers whose influence started in the 1980 and is still alive at present in the voice of authors like Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Through a flat, affectless, atonal prose and non-committed narrative voices, these writers deal with contemporary urban life, violence, sex, drugs and consumerism. The following references are a selection of the most interesting monographs and essays that deal with the theoretical implications of blank fiction writing.
Aaron, Michele. 2004. "(Fill-in-the) Blank Fiction: Dennis Cooper’s Cinematics and the Complicitous Reader." Journal of Modern Literature, 27. 3 (Winter): 115-127
Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán. 2000. "The Narratorial Function in Minimalist Fiction." Neohelicon, XXVII.2: 237-248.
---. 2001. "Minimalism vs. Postmodernism in Contemporary American Fiction." Neohelicon, XXVIII.1: 129-143.
Aldridge, John W. 1992. Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction.New York: Charles Scribner.
Annesley, James. 1998. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel.New York:St. Martin’s Press.
Baelo-Allué, Sonia. 2011. Bret Easton Ellis's Controversial Fiction: Writing Between High and Low Culture.London andNew York: Continuum.
Bawer, Bruce. 1988. Diminishing Fictions: Essays on the Modern American Novel and Its Critics.Saint Paul: Graywolf Press.
Bilton, Alan. 2002. An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction.Edinburgh:EdinburghUniversity Press.
ChÉnetier, Marc. 1996 (1989). Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960. Elizabeth A. Houlding, trans.Philadelphia:University ofPennsylvania Press.
Collado Rodríguez, Francisco. 2007. "From Theory to Practice: Blank Fiction, Ethics, and Hybridism in Palahniuk’s Stranger Than Fiction and Invisible Monsters."" Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders. Nieves Pascual, Laura Alonso-Gallo, Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, eds.Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 189-200.
Durand, Alain-Philippe and Naomi Mandel, eds. 2006. Novels of the Contemporary Extreme.New York: Continuum.
Gardner, James. 1997. The Age of Extremism: The Enemies of Compromise in American Politics, Culture, and Race Relations. Secaucus: Carol Publishing Group.
Grassian, Daniel. 2003. Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X.Jefferson,North Carolina andLondon: McFarland.
Kauffman, Linda S. 1998. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture.Berkeley: TheUniversity ofCalifornia Press.
Leypoldt, Günter. 2001. Casual Silences: The Poetics of Minimal Realism from Raymond Carver and the New Yorker School to Bret Easton Ellis.Trier: Wissenschaftlicher VerlagTrier.
Lievens, Jeroen. 2002. "Tied to the Handle of a Shopping Cart: The Representation of Manhattan’s Spatiality in ‘Blank Fiction’ Novels." BELL. Belgian Essays on Language and Literature: 93-107.
Mandel, Naomi, ed. 2011. Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park. Continuum Series on Contemporary North American Fiction.London andNew York: Continuum.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2005. "Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk." Philosophy and Literature, 29: 394-408.
Pao, Maria T. 2002. "Sex, drugs, and rock & roll: Historias del Kronen as blank fiction." Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, (March).
Petry, Mike. 2001. "Pulling Down the Fun-House of Postmodernism: Forms and Functions of Violence in American ‘Brat Pack’ Fiction of the 1980s and 90s." The Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Violence. Michael Hensen and Annette Pankrantz, eds.Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz. 155-168.
Schumacher, Michael. 1988. Reasons to Believe: New Voices in American Fiction.New York:St. Martin’s Press.
Siegle, Robert. 1989. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency.Baltimore:JohnsHopkinsUniversity Press.
Slocombe, Will. 2006. Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern: The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship from Romanticism to Postmodernism.New York andLondon: Routledge.
Taylor, Marvin J. 2004. "‘I’ll Be Your Mirror, Reflect What You Are’: Postmodern Documentation and the Downtown New York Scene from 1975 to the Present." A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture. Josephine G. Hendin, ed.Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 383-399.
Vogrincic, Ana. 2007. "Literary Effects of Author-Stardom." Literary Intermediality: The Transit of Literature through the Media Circuit.Bern: Peter Lang. 204-218.
Young, Elizabeth and Graham Caveney. 1992. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London and New York: Serpent’s Tail.