Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction

by Richard Walsh

Overview

Novel Arguments deals with American innovative (postmodern, metafictional, experimental) fiction since the sixties. It advances a concept of the "argument" of fiction to correct criticism's too purely formal interest in innovation. The book closely examines the readings of five important innovative novels by Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Kathy Acker and shows how they achieve an effective articulation of their concerns by virtue of their innovation, which is aimed at a making new of fictional cognition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521107037
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/02/2009
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #91
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. The idea of innovative fiction; 2. How to succeed: Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father; 3. 'A man's story is his gris-gris': cultural slavery, literary emancipation and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada; 4. Narrative inscription, history and the reader in Robert Coover's The Public Burning; 5. 'One's image of oneself': Structured identity in Walter Abish's How German Is It; 6. The quest for love and the writing of female desire in Kathy Acker's Don Quixote; Conclusion; Notes; Index.