Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317205022
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature by : Nick Levey

Download or read book Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature written by Nick Levey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows that while these novels are preoccupied with detail and description, they are relatively unconcerned with the traditional goals of representation. Instead, they use detail to communicate particular values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and ability attached to the management of complex and excessive information. Whether reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream culture, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency in the age of automation and the internet, these texts model significant abilities, rather than just objects of significance, and encourage readers to develop habits of reading that complement the demands of an increasingly detailed culture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theoretical schools and cultural texts, including Thing Theory, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the book proposes a new understanding of maximalist writing and a new way of approaching the usefulness of literary objects in contemporary culture.

Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317205030
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature by : Nick Levey

Download or read book Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature written by Nick Levey and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows that while these novels are preoccupied with detail and description, they are relatively unconcerned with the traditional goals of representation. Instead, they use detail to communicate particular values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and ability attached to the management of complex and excessive information. Whether reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream culture, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency in the age of automation and the internet, these texts model significant abilities, rather than just objects of significance, and encourage readers to develop habits of reading that complement the demands of an increasingly detailed culture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theoretical schools and cultural texts, including Thing Theory, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the book proposes a new understanding of maximalist writing and a new way of approaching the usefulness of literary objects in contemporary culture.

The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes

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Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119431719
Total Pages : 1607 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (194 download)

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Book Synopsis The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes by : Patrick O'Donnell

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 2 Volumes written by Patrick O'Donnell and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 1607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

The Maximalist Novel

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1623564964
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (235 download)

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Book Synopsis The Maximalist Novel by : Stefano Ercolino

Download or read book The Maximalist Novel written by Stefano Ercolino and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-06-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Maximalist Novel sets out to define a new genre of contemporary fiction that developed in the United States from the early 1970s, and then gained popularity in Europe in the early twenty-first century. The maximalist novel has a very strong symbolic and morphological identity. Ercolino sets out ten particular elements which define and structure it as a complex literary form: length, an encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narrratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, inter-semiocity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. These ten characteristics are common to all of the seven works that centre his discussion: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Underworld by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and 2005 dopo Cristo by the Babette Factory. Though the ten features are not all present in the same way or form in every single text, they are all decisive in defining the genre of the maximalist novel, insofar as they are systematically co-present. Taken singularly, they can be easily found both in modernist and postmodern novels, which are not maximalist. Nevertheless, it is precisely their co-presence, as well as their reciprocal articulation, which make them fundamental in demarcating the maximalist novel as a genre.

The Art of Excess

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252061028
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (61 download)

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Book Synopsis The Art of Excess by : Tom LeClair

Download or read book The Art of Excess written by Tom LeClair and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031486714
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (314 download)

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Book Synopsis Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction by : Stuart J. Taylor

Download or read book Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction written by Stuart J. Taylor and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set

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Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1405192445
Total Pages : 1581 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set by : Brian W. Shaffer

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 1581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

The Program Era

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674054245
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis The Program Era by : Mark McGurl

Download or read book The Program Era written by Mark McGurl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

Monument Maker

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Publisher : White Rabbit
ISBN 13 : 1474617115
Total Pages : 816 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (746 download)

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Book Synopsis Monument Maker by : David Keenan

Download or read book Monument Maker written by David Keenan and published by White Rabbit. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR CONCRETE ISLANDS NO. 1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 'In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination' LENNY KAYE 'Visionary and prismatic, gloriously hallucinatory although grounded in the material, Monument Maker's grand sweep takes in distant historical subterrains, a shimmering summer of the present, the transient, the eternal, the profane, the divine' WENDY ERSKINE 'I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream' EDNA O'BRIEN 'A masterpiece' WILLIAM BASINSKI Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe. MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE; whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral. Written over the course of 10 years, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan's project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.

The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108394094
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction by : Stacey Olster

Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction written by Stacey Olster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction explores fiction written over the last thirty years in the context of the profound political, historical, and cultural changes that have distinguished the contemporary period. Focusing on both established and emerging writers - and with chapters devoted to the American historical novel, regional realism, the American political novel, the end of the Cold War and globalization, 9/11, borderlands and border identities, race, and the legacy of postmodern aesthetics - this Introduction locates contemporary American fiction at the intersection of a specific time and long-standing traditions. In the process, it investigates the entire concept of what constitutes an “American” author while exploring the vexed, yet resilient, nature of what the concept of home has come to signify in so much writing today. This wide-ranging study will be invaluable to students, instructors, and general readers alike.

A Peculiar Peril

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ISBN 13 : 0374308896
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (743 download)

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Book Synopsis A Peculiar Peril by : Jeff VanderMeer

Download or read book A Peculiar Peril written by Jeff VanderMeer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Peculiar Peril is a head-spinning epic about three friends on a quest to protect the world from a threat as unknowable as it is terrifying, from the Nebula Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer. Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion—a veritable cabinet of curiosities—once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables). Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.

Why Did I Ever

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Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1619029677
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis Why Did I Ever by : Mary Robison

Download or read book Why Did I Ever written by Mary Robison and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tense, moving, and hilarious . . . [A] dark jewel of a novel.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and convinced that her dealings with Hollywood have fractured her personality, Money Breton talks to herself nonstop. She glues and hammers and paints every item in her place. She forges loving inscriptions in all her books. Through it all, there is her darling puzzling daughter who lives close by but seems ever beyond reach, and her son, the damaged victim of a violent crime under police protection in New York. While both her children seem to be losing all their battles, Money tries for ways and reasons to keep battling. Why Did I Ever is a book of piercing intellect and belligerent humor. Since its first publication in 2002 it has had a profound impact, not only on Robison’s devoted following, but on the shape of the contemporary novel itself.

The Art of Editing

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501338277
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis The Art of Editing by : Tim Groenland

Download or read book The Art of Editing written by Tim Groenland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of the editor in literary production is an ambiguous and often invisible one, requiring close attention to publishing history and (often inaccessible) archival resources to bring it into focus. In The Art of Editing, Tim Groenland shows that the critical tendency to overlook the activities of editors and to focus on the solitary author figure neglects important elements of how literary works are acquired, developed and disseminated. Focusing on selected works of fiction by Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, authors who represent stylistic touchstones for US fiction of recent decades, Groenland presents two case studies of editorial collaboration. Carver's early stories were integral to the emergence of the Minimalist movement in the 1980s, while Wallace's novels marked a generational shift towards a more expansive, maximal mode of narrative. The role of their respective editors, however, is often overlooked. Gordon Lish's part in shaping the form of Carver's early stories remains under-explored; analyses of Wallace's fiction, meanwhile, tend to minimise Michael Pietsch's role from the creation of Infinite Jest during the mid-1990s until the present day. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with editors and collaborators, Groenland illuminates the complex and often conflicting forms of agency involved in the genesis of these influential works. The energies and tensions of the editing process emerge as essential factors in the creation of fictions more commonly understood within the paradigm of solitary authorship. The mediating role of the editor is, Groenland argues, inseparable from the development, form, and reception of these works.

The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137404116
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (374 download)

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Book Synopsis The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947 by : S. Ercolino

Download or read book The Novel-Essay, 1884-1947 written by S. Ercolino and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel-essay emerged in France, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and reached its highest formal complexity in Austria and Germany, during the interwar period. Here, Ercolino argues that it is crucial for a renovated understating of the history of the novel in modernity.

The David Foster Wallace Reader

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Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316329177
Total Pages : 1335 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (163 download)

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Book Synopsis The David Foster Wallace Reader by : David Foster Wallace

Download or read book The David Foster Wallace Reader written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 1335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here — with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely. This volume presents his most dazzling, funniest, and most heartbreaking work — essays like his famous cruise-ship piece, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," excerpts from his novels The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King, and legendary stories like "The Depressed Person." Wallace's explorations of morality, self-consciousness, addiction, sports, love, and the many other subjects that occupied him are represented here in both fiction and nonfiction. Collected for the first time are Wallace's first published story, "The View from Planet Trillaphon as Seen In Relation to the Bad Thing" and a selection of his work as a writing instructor, including reading lists, grammar guides, and general guidelines for his students. A dozen writers and critics, including Hari Kunzru, Anne Fadiman, and Nam Le, add afterwords to favorite pieces, expanding our appreciation of the unique pleasures of Wallace's writing. The result is an astonishing volume that shows the breadth and range of "one of America's most daring and talented writers" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) whose work was full of humor, insight, and beauty.

The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107195950
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace by : Ralph Clare

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace written by Ralph Clare and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling, comprehensive, and substantive introduction to the work of David Foster Wallace.

Twenty-First-Century Fiction

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107244498
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Twenty-First-Century Fiction by : Peter Boxall

Download or read book Twenty-First-Century Fiction written by Peter Boxall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament – one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.