The Futures of the Present: New Directions in (American) Literature

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-367-07489-0
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 144 Seiten, Format (B × H): 174 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 249 g

It has become a critical commonplace that postmodernism no longer serves as an adequate designation for contemporary literature. But what comes after postmodernism? What are the tendencies and directions within contemporary American literature that promise to shape its future?

The contributions to this book are written in the shadows of ‘new media’, a turn towards the nonhuman in critical thinking, and a surge in environmental and apocalyptic thought. Engaging with such contemporary debates, the authors map the rapidly changing ecosystem of contemporary literary genres and forms and attend to transformations in the production, reception, and circulation of books. This book takes for granted that American literature does have a future, although whatever this future holds, it is unlikely to be what we expect. At this historical juncture, the American novel seems to carve its future though an engagement with issues at the forefront of our present, thereby ensuring its own ongoing contemporaneity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fjellestad, Danuta

Watson, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: The Futures of American Literature 1. Minds, Messages, and the Moral Imagination in the Media of Fiction: Inanimate Alice between Cognitive and Rhetorical Paradigms 2. "Take that you intellectuals!" and "kaPOW!": Adam Thirlwell and the Metamodernist Future of Style 3. The Paradoxes of "Unnatural" Mimesis in Gordon Sheppard’s HA! 4. Utopia, Sort of: A Case Study in Metamodernism 5. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, the Anthropocene, and the Scales of Literature 6. The Space of Genre in the New Green Novel 7. A Sociological Imagination 8. The Role of Place in the Post-Apocalypse: Contrasting The Road and World War Z 9. Walking as a Metaphor for Narrativity

Über Autor(innen)

Danuta Fjellestad is Professor of English at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is primarily interested in the experimental American novel of the 20th and 21st centuries.

David Watson is Associate Professor of English at Uppsala University, Sweden. He works on contemporary and nineteenth-century American fiction.