The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

- Reviews -

Imagine a novel as an object in the world: not the imaginative dream that readers are normally invited to get lost in, but a novel with a body that has to be confronted. As Mary Holland argues, contemporary understandings of the world, and the Material Turn in philosophical concepts of the human and of nature, have also energized the 21st century novel--a conceptual pivot as fundamental as the turn to psychology or language during the modern or postmodern periods. Cultural sea changes so profound that they drive a rethinking of all the arts occur only once or twice in a generation: The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism is an exciting, field-changing analysis of how today, the new-material novel revitalizes print through its entanglement with readers and the stuff of the world--and the consequences wrought by these new realisms. * Steve Tomasula, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame, USA, and author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and The Book of Portraiture (2006) *
The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism radically and fruitfully upends all the critical truisms about realism(s), bringing both sanity and clarity to central literary and literary historical periodizing debates. By bringing together all the relevant theory, astute, insightful criticism, and, most significantly, innovative literary practice, it blows open all totalizing models of language/narrative/'real' world relations to theorize the fiction written in our twenty-first century 'reality.' This is an acutely analytic, intellectually generous, meticulously researched book that puts metafiction in its (real) place. * Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980) *
What is the realism that comes after postmodernism? Many critics of contemporary fiction have sought to answer this question, but none has had Mary Holland's encyclopedic mastery of the materials necessary to do so in a way that seems fully responsive to the possibilities of the novel in our time. This book works on many levels: as a useful primer on what "realism" has meant in U.S. literature from the 19th century to the present; as a dazzlingly sure-handed tour of recent turns in the dialectic of experimental fiction that have pressed the term on our attention again; as an eloquent case for the ethical implications of all of our attempts to know what reality really is. * Mark McGurl, Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, Stanford University, USA, and author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2011) *
Focusing on literary form, technique, and genre, Mary K. Holland's The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism compares contemporary 'realist' writers such as David Foster Wallace, Steve Tomasula, and Ted Chiang to nineteenth-century versions of realism, arguing that 'realism' is best understood as writing emerging at historical junctures when social consensus about the real is undergoing paradigmatic changes. Infused with her own passion for reading, writing, and teaching, her analyses of these challenging writers resonate with authenticity, moral clarity, and deep understanding of how literary texts achieve their effects. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of realistic fictions. * N. Katherine Hayles, Professor Emerita of English, Duke University, USA, and author of How We Became Posthuman (1999) *

- Author Bio -

Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at The State University of New York, New Paltz, USA. She is the author of Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (Bloomsbury 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

- Full Details -

Status:	Active
ISBN-13:	9781501362620
Published:	9 Jul 2020
Published In:	United States
Imprint:	Bloomsbury Academic USA
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Format:	Paperback
Height:	216mm
Width:	140mm
Pages:	312

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