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This book focuses on the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities in modern and contemporary fiction. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), this collection examines narratives by Joyce, Mansfield, Davies, Naipaul, DeLillo, Atwood and others.
Examines how communities or noncommunities are represented in fictional works and shows how communities have been represented in fiction as precarious and fractured.
Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction. Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities.
Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction examines the relation between secrecy and community in a diverse and international range of contemporary fictional works in English. In its concern with what is called 'communities of secrecy', it is fundamentally indebted to the thought of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, who have pointed to the fallacies and dangers of identitarian and exclusionary communities, arguing for forms of being-in-common characterized by non-belonging, singularity and otherness. Also drawing on the work of J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Nicholas Royle, Matei Calinescu, Frank Kermode and George Simmel, among others, this volume analyses the centrality of secrets in the construction of literary form, narrative sequence and meaning, together with their foundational role in our private and interpersonal lives and the public and political realms. In doing so, it engages with the Derridean ethico-political value of secrecy and Derrida's conception of literature as the exemplary site for the operation of the unconditional secret.
In dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models, twentieth century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspectives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a practice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with scientific theories and concepts— the Big Bang, quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and so on—that resist our common-sense intuitions and appear discontinuous, in spatial as well as temporal terms, with our bodies? This book sets out to answer this question by showing how the embodiment of mind continues to matter even as writers— and readers—are pushed out of their terrestrial comfort zone. Offering thoughtful commentary on work by both mainstream literary authors and science fiction writers (from Primo Levi to Jeanette Winterson, from Olaf Stapledon to Pamela Zoline), Embodiment and the Cosmic Perspective in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores the multiple ways in which narrative can radically defamiliarize our bodily experience and bridge the gap with cosmic realities. This investigation affords an opportunity to reflect on the role of literature as it engages with science and charts its epistemological and ethical ramifications.
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
Many twentieth-century literary writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This book explores literature's direct relationship to politics, offering new ways of thinking about the troubled relationship between literature and politics.
In The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Richard van Leeuwen challenges conventional perceptions of the development of 20th-century prose by arguing that Thousand and One Nights, as an intertextual model, has been a crucial influence on authors who have contributed to shaping the main literary currents in 20th-century world literature, inspiring new forms and concepts of literature and texts.
Heather Ingman's study argues that reading twentieth-century Irish women's fiction in the light of Kristeva's theories of nationhood places Irish women at the heart of writing about the nation and demonstrates that the political dimension of their fiction has often been underestimated. Her book is an important contribution to the study of gender in Irish writing that changes the way we view Irish women's writing.
In this book Guy Reynolds offers a wide-ranging introduction to American women writers. He discusses a wide range of authors from Sarah Orne Jewett to Toni Morrison and the common themes and genres that they have covered. He presents detailed readings of both classic and little-known fictions, placing works in the social and historical contexts of their times. Incisive and detailed, this book will interest readers and students in this increasingly important field of study.
