The Cold War's end coincided with two developments that had profound impact on political and intellectual life during the 1990s and 2000s: the decline of postmodernism and the comeback of cultural pluralism. The contemporary historical novel-from DeLillo's Underworld and Roth's "American Trilogy" to Powers's Plowing the Dark and Morrison's A Mercy-exemplifies these developments by imagining the writing of history as a powerful form of world-making, taking up a nineteenth-century tradition of philosophical pragmatism that replaced universal truth with plurality of belief and experience. Rather than questioning the representability of history, contemporary historical fiction asks how we can use history to make our individual lives meaningful in the face of an unknown future. It sees its value no longer in what we know about history-a question of universal truth-but in what we feel about it-a question of difference and subject plurality. Philipp Löffler excavates the origins of nineteenth-century pluralism and its revival in the last two decades, revealing how major American novelists have appropriated the historical novel in the pursuit of selfhood rather than truth, fundamentally repositioning the genre in contemporary American culture. Philipp Löffler is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.