Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel

Description

In Modernist Futures, David James examines the implications of modernism's continuity in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing by tracing its political and ethical valences in emerging novelistic practices. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and Phillip Roth, James reconsiders the purpose of literary innovation as it relates to the artistic and cultural interventions such writers perform. By rethinking critical and disciplinary parameters, James brings scholarship on contemporary fiction into dialogue with modernist studies, offering a nuanced account of narrative strategies that sheds new light on the form of the novel today. An ambitious and incisive contribution to the field, this book will appeal especially to scholars of modernism and contemporary literary culture as well as those in American and postcolonial studies.

David James is Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Nottingham. Author of Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception (2008), his articles have appeared in such venues as Modernism/Modernity, The Journal of Modern Literature and Textual Practice. He is editor of The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (2011).

"This book bridges what James calls the traditional incompatibilities between close reading and cultural analysis, and envisions a future for the not-yet-complete promise of modernism." --Choice