The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666 - Couverture souple

Ercolino, Stefano

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1501314297 ISBN 13 : 9781501314292

Editeur : Bloomsbury Academic USA, 2015

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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.

Revue de presse :

Ercolino situates his contribution in response to three competing paradigms for thinking about long narrative works: Tom LeClairs systems novel, Franco Morettis world text, and Frederick Karls Mega-Novel. Morettis Modern Epic looms perhaps the largest among these three, and one of The Maximalist Novels greatest strengths is in the way it extends Morettis classic analysis to incorporate the developments in epic form ushered in by postwar writers [T]his book makes a valuable contribution to novel theory and should be of interest to readers intent on understanding how the big, ambitious novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century work. --Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 51 Issue 2 (April 2015)

Ercolino knows his literary theory; his introduction . . . makes well his case for understanding maximalism as a genre beyond the questions of mastery, encyclopaedism and national identity . . . [and] it is on this theoretical ground that Ercolino's argument is at its strongest --Kiron Ward, Textual Practice

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic USA
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1501314297
• ISBN 13: 9781501314292
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 208