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Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. This book describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. It argues that in presenting literary history this way, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have—and, the book suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

This book brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory. The book offers an account of ‘prolepsis’ or ‘flashforward’ in the contemporary novel that retrieves it from the realm of experimentation and places it at the heart of a contemporary mode of being, both personal and collective, which experiences the present as the object of a future memory. With reference to some of the most important recent developments in the philosophy of time, it aims to define a set of questions about tense and temporal reference in narrative that make it possible to reconsider the function of stories in contemporary culture. The text also reopens traditional questions about the difference between literature and philosophy in relation to knowledge of time. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of a range of contemporary fiction by writers such as Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift.

This is a book about translation and literary influence. It takes as its subject Spain’s most important contemporary novelist, Javier Marías (1951), who worked as a literary translator for a significant portion of his early career. Since then, he has maintained that translation had a crucial impact on the development of his writing style and his literary frame of reference. It examines his claims to the influence of three writers whose works he translated: Laurence Sterne, Sir Thomas Browne, and Vladimir Nabokov. It does so by engaging in close reading of his translations, examining how he meets the linguistic, syntactic, and cultural challenges they present. His prolonged engagement with their prose is then set alongside his own novels and short stories, the better to discern precisely how and in what ways his works have been shaped by their influence and through translation. This study begins by asking why Marías should have turned to translation in the cultural landscape of Spain in the 1970s and how the ideological standpoints that animated his decision affect the way he translates. His translation of Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is set alongside his pseudo-autobiographical novel Negra espalda del tiempo (Dark Back of Time), while his translation of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial is then analysed in tandem with that produced by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Subsequent chapters examine how Browne’s prose has shaped Marías’s thinking on oblivion, posterity, and time. The final chapters offer an analysis of the partial translation and palimpsest of Lolita he undertook in the early 1990s and of his most ambitious novel to date, Tu rostro mañana (Your Face Tomorrow), as a work in which characterization is underpinned by both literary allusion and the hydridization of works Marías has translated.

This book is an introduction to the work of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel-Prize-winning French contemporary author. Using a theoretical approach based on the work of Genette and Ricoeur, the study teases out the complexities of Modiano’s apparently simple narratives, showing how they skilfully weave together the fictional and historical to involve and draw the reader into the worlds of his novels, whether it be the murky labyrinth of the années noires or the amoral yet attractive landscape of the sixties. The book also discusses new aspects of Modiano’s post-2000 novels, such as the greater role played in them by women, the unexpected appearance of ideas from Nietzsche, and a meditation on the nature of time that owes much to – but is profoundly different from – that of his illustrious precursor, Proust.

Re-examining elaborate English stylists from the post-war period to the present day (including Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell) through a fresh style of ethical criticism that does not over-rely on notions of character and interiority (the terrain of the ‘humanist revival’), and that returns the author to centre-stage (contra the approach of the ‘new ethics’, with its indebtedness to poststructuralism), Novel Style defends the stylistic excesses of writers who were conscious of both writing out of excessive times and of the need for new kinds of artistic response to contemporary ethical pressures. Through its methodology, Novel Style calls for a return to close reading and aesthetic evaluation and recovers its subjects from theoretical quagmires by repositioning them as stylists and ethicists, arguing that the two positions are inextricable. For example, it considers how forms of stylistic excess—ranging from puns and wordplay to long sentences, proliferating imagery, repetitions, idiosyncratic rhythms, multiple levels of narration, and variable points of view—might enact ethically-charged dynamics like curiosity, particularity, complexity, and empathy. As well as being an impassioned defence of literary excess, flamboyance, and close reading, Novel Style asks fundamental questions about how novels think, see, and feel, and how they might change us.