What makes characters seem real? This book explores the ways Tolstoy and Dostoevsky created the illusion of autonomous characters, through techniques that paradoxically hindered the writers’ ambitions for the novel as a genre.
The book advances an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of Vladimir Nabokov, for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to free will.
Lindsey Stewart wades into unease about how Black southern joy is portrayed by analyzing work by Zora Neale Hurston. Stewart theorizes the politics of joy, a refusal of the neo-abolitionism that would reduce southern Black life to tragedy or social death.
Queer Tidalectics investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics.
An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature examines literary challenges to Israel’s national narratives. Many prominent Israeli fiction writers use the prism of suicide to confront the centrality of the army, the mythology of the “new Jew,” the vision of Tel Aviv as the first Israeli city, and the very process by which a nation’s history is constructed.
This book examines the interaction of literature and radical social movement, exploring how to address the limitations of contemporary anarchist politics through attentive engagement with Native women’s literatures. The author argues that anarchists must shift the paradigm that another world is possible to one that sees other worlds here.
In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland shows that Dostoevsky aimed to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting the disintegration caused by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s.
Word Play focuses on the intertwined fates of children’s literature and underground poetry throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature experimental poets whose unpublished work was not written for children but featured a childlike lyric speaker, diction, form, and humor.
This book examines works by authors like Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead to show that the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of the temporality that governs our contemporary world.
At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter examines the fear of materiality in German-language realist and postrealist literature.
