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An engaging series of reflections on the literary landscape of our time—from the writings of Roland Barthes to those of Stephen King—Wood explores such issues as the shift of interest from novel to story, the blurring of the line between fiction and criticism, the persistence of the notion of paradise, the lure of horror, and the tendency of fiction both to reflect and to resist contemporary history. Wood casts his net wide: a brilliant dissection of Beckett's prose comedy is followed by an absorbing sequence of essays on Kundera, Calvino and García Márquez. Chapters on Toni Morrison and on Angela Carter lead us to chapters on Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson.
Price: $28.00
Pages: 224
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date:
06 October 1999
ISBN: 9780231050494
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / General
[Wood] is one of our most distinguished and lucid writers on contemporary literature.
Michael Wood writes film and literary criticism for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. He is Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English at Princeton University, a frequent teacher at the Middlebury Breadloaf School of English, and the author of many books, including America in the Movies (Columbia 1989).
Introduction
Maps of Fiction
The Kindness of Novels (Ronald Barthes)
The Comedy of Ignorance (Samuel Beckett)
Politics in Paradise (Julio Cortazar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas)
The Motive for Metaphor (Milan Kundera)
The Promised Land (Italo Calvino)
Other Times
A Postmodernist Romance (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
The Mind Has Mountains (Toni Morrison)
Tigers and Mirrors (Angela Carter)
All the rage (Stephen King)
Stories and Silences
Lost Paradises (Edward Said)
The Discourse of Others (Kazuo Ishiguro)
The Nightmare of Narrative (Jeanette Winterson)