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A collection of interviews with leading writers such as Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Arundhati Roy and Will Self. Through these interviews the book explores and introduces a range of key themes in contemporary literature, raising questions about genre, history, postmodernism, celebrity culture and form.
This edited volume focuses on Anglo-American modernist fiction, offering challenging perspectives that consider modernism in the instances in which it transcends itself, moving, broadly speaking, towards postmodernist self-irony. As such, the contributions here discuss issues such as being in creation; narrativizing being and creation; the relation between being and narrative; the situation of being in narrative time and space; the relation between authority and narrative; possible authority over narrative and the authority of narrative; interaction between narrative and the other; the authority of the other over and within the narrative; and the inter-referentiality of text and author. Divided into two parts, “Towards High Modernism” and “After Modernism”, the book allows the reader to chronologically follow how authors’ relations to literature in general evolved with the changing world and new perspectives on the nature of reality. This book offers an insightful contribution to the on-going discussion on the ambiguities inherent in the concepts of author, narrative, and being, and will stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means ...
This comprehensive volume offers compelling critical essays surveying the myriad forms of innovation in contemporary Anglophone life writing. Experimental Life Writing Today provides a historical and critical context for examining avant-garde tendencies in biography and autobiography and outlines the poetics of experimental life writing. The volume is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to a selection of experimental genres of life writing: autofiction, biofiction, paramemoir, autotheory, graphic memoir, photo-memoir, eco-memoir and the lyric essay. Part Two includes chapters concerned with the following themes, concepts and devices set in the context of experimental life writing: i...
Flyover Fictions critically engages the history and contemporary use of the "flyover country" trope in American culture and repurposes the concept as an abstract tool for cultural studies. The term "flyover" arose in the 1970s with variations--"flyover country," "flyover states"--mainly used as synonyms for the American Midwest in intranational banter regarding cultural differences from the dominant urban centers of New York City and Los Angeles. In recent years, the trope has shifted away from this playfulness and its traditional geographic reference points to indicate larger political and cultural developments that speak of a deepening polarization in the United States. Flyover Fictions is...
Jonathan Coe is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed contemporary British writers. This comprehensive introduction places his work in clear historical and theoretical context, offering extensive readings of the author's ten novels from The Accidental Woman to Expo 58, including the remarkable What a Carve Up! The book explores Coe's biography and his experimentations with narrative, genre and comedy, as well as his thematic preoccupations with history, memory, loss and nostalgia. The first volume devoted entirely to Coe, this book includes: - A supporting timeline of key dates in literature and current events - An examination of the critical reception to Coe's works - An exclusive interview with Jonathan Coe himself
This book offers a study of the literary marketplace in the early 2000s. Focusing on the Man Booker Prize and its impact on a novel's media attention, Anna Auguscik analyses the mechanisms by which the Prize both recognises books that trigger debates and itself becomes the object of such debates. Based on case studies of six novels (by Aravind Adiga, Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Barry, Mark Haddon, DBC Pierre, Zadie Smith) and their attention profiles, this work describes the Booker as a 'problem-driven attention-generating mechanism', the influence of which can only be understood in relation to other participants in literary interaction.
While some writers adamantly refuse to allow anyone to read, let alone comment upon, their literary production until it is published, others are willing to submit their manuscripts and work in progress to their peers, in the hope of receiving critical judgment that might validate their choices, or prompt them to introduce changes. Correspondences between writers thus contain treasures of literary analysis when the recipient of a piece annotates it, criticises it, judges it, inciting the sender to justify or defend his/her choices, to reconsider his/her method and to discuss his/her aesthetic principles. The aim of this collection of essays is to analyse the specificity of letters in which wr...
Julian Barnes's work has been marked by great variety, ranging not only from conventional fiction to postmodernist experimentation in such well-known novels as Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters (1989), but also from witty essays to deeply touching short stories. The responses of readers and critics have likewise varied, from enthusiasm to scepticism, as the substantial volume of critical analysis demonstrates. This Readers' Guide provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the essential criticism on Barnes's work, drawing from a selection of reviews, interviews, essays and books. Through the presentation and assessment of key critical interpretations, Vanessa Guignery provides the most wide-ranging examination of his fiction and non-fiction so far, considering key issues such as his use of language, his treatment of history, obsession, love, and the relationship between fact and fiction. Covering all of the novels to date, from Metroland (1981) to Arthur and George (2005), this is an invaluable introduction to the work of one of Britain's most exciting and popular contemporary writers.