Marshall Boswell

The Wallace Effect (eBook, ePUB)

David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating "The Wallace Effect"-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries. A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence. By re-situating Wallace's work in a broader and more contentious literary arena, The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the limits of Wallace's legacy.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 184
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. Januar 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501344916
• Artikelnr.: 55067423

Autorenporträt

Marshall Boswell is Professor and Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA. He is the author of John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion and Understanding David Foster Wallace. He is the co-editor, with Stephen Burn, of A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies and served as Guest Editor for a two-part special issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to David Foster Wallace's novels. He is also the the author of two works of fiction, Trouble with Girls and the novel Alternative Atlanta.

Inhaltsangabe

Series Editor's Foreword
Introduction
Toward Wallace
1. Something Both and Neither: Marshes, Marriage and the Fertile Invention
of John Barth's The Tidewater Tales
2. The Awful Way Back to We: Crackpot Realism and Ironic Realism in Richard
Powers' Prisoner's Dilemma
The Wallace Effect
3. The Rival Lover: David Foster Wallace and the Anxiety of Influence in
Jeffrey Eugenides; The Marriage Plot
4. The Varieties of Irony: Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and the
Comedy of Redemption
5. Competitive Friendship: Love and Reckoning in Jonathan Franzen's
Freedom
6. Against Wallace: Amy Hungerford, Lauren Groff, and the Resistance to
Genius
Conclusion: Love & Cruelty
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index