Alan Bilton's main areas of academic interest are contemporary American fiction, silent cinema, and modernism and postmodernism. He is the author of An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh/New York University Press, 2002), which explores the work of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Rolando Hinojosa, E.Annie Proulx, Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland and Thomas Pynchon), and co-editor of the three-volume American in the 1920’s: Literary Sources and Documents (Helm Publishing, 2004). An Introduction to American Fiction was described by The Library Journal as “a welcome addition to the often-bloated scholarship on literary postmodermism” and “a fine starting point for any novice in the field”, while America in the 1920’s, reviewed in The European Journal of American Culture, was described as “a wonderful insight into 1920’s America which ranges well beyond any narrow definition of literature … a suburb cultural history, particularly valuable to those who really want to understand the nature and romanticised memory of the ‘roaring twenties’”. He has also written articles on Saul Bellow, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Don DeLillo, and is currently working on a book on silent film comedy, Constantly Moving Happiness Machines.

He is also a novelist, and lectures in creative writing here at Swansea. His first novel, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball, was published by Alcemi in 2009, a comic love story inspired by (amongst other things) silent film: part slapstick comedy, part anxiety dream, and part surreal city tour. Since then he has published a number of short stories and a second novel, The Known and Unknown Sea is forthcoming.