The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre

This monograph is an interdisciplinary study of the concept of 'fragment' in literature and in critical and literary theory. It discusses the fragment's performativity and function within a historical perspective, stretching from Heraclitus, via the German Romantics and European writers of the Modernist period, to American postmodern manifestations of the fragment.

This is the first history of the fragment to appear in English, and it is also the first attempt at producing a consistent taxon...