Miss(ed) Generation: Douglas Coupland’s Miss Wyoming

Abstract

This article presents a reading of Douglas Coupland’s 2000 novel Miss Wyoming. Long before this novel was published Coupland had denounced the Generation X phenomena he had started in the early nineties, and this article examines Miss Wyoming’s intertextual references to Jack Kerouac as a representative of the Beat generation, which was the previous self-labeled literary generation in North America before the Generation X of the 1990s. Taking this relationship as a point of departure, the article also explores the novel’s relationship with the Bildungsroman, and it is suggested that the novel portrays communicative and emotional immaturity especially in relation to ideas of postmodernism and irony.

Keywords

• Douglas Coupland
• Miss Wyoming
• generational literature
• irony
• postmodernism
• Bildungsromane