A legendarily difficult novel, Finnegans Wake is the culmination of James Joyce’s life and work as an artist. It is a playground, a wrecking yard, a battlefield of literary experimentation and mythic allegory, placing demands on its readers that can… Read More ›
This experimental novel includes aspects of both realism and antirealism, and it mixes several narrative strands using different strategies and varying the point of view from one section of the novel to another. The novel opens with a kind of… Read More ›
Dr. Samuel Johnson once claimed that “nothing odd can last.” As an example, he cited Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which had temporarily fallen from favor. Over two centuries later, that same novel may well… Read More ›
“As Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.” So begins The Metamorphosis, a sinister allegory of dehumanization and hopelessness in the modern world by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Once rendered an… Read More ›
The reclusive French writer Marcel Proust, now considered by many scholars as the greatest novelist of the 20th century, labored for more than 14 years and died while still adding to what would eventually be a seven-volume masterpiece. The novel… Read More ›
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a novel by Italo Calvino (1923–85) from late in his writing career. Calvino was an Italian fiction writer well known for stories and novels that range in character from fables to neorealist… Read More ›
Cosmicomics is a collection of linked short narratives written by the celebrated Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923–85). The stories prove to be a unified meditation on scientific theories of the inception and evolution of the universe as seen through the… Read More ›
Though the term metalanguage—a language that describes or analyzes another language— was in use well before the 1960s, it was around this time that theorists including Roman Jakobson (Linguistics and Poetics [1960]) and Roland Barthes (Mythologies [1957] and Elements of… Read More ›
William H. Gass is an eminent theorist and practitioner of postmodern metafiction, self-reflexive, performative fictions that emphasize the writing process itself by directing the reader’s attention to the author’s shaping presence in the showy deployment of literary strategies and conventions…. Read More ›
This is the title of the novel begun by Joyce on his 22nd birthday, February 2, 1904, shortly after the editors of Dana had rejected his essay “A Portrait of the Artist” because they deemed its contents unsuitable for their… Read More ›
This is the title that Joyce gave to his first published novel, derived, as noted below, from the shorter version given to an earlier prose piece. Joyce composed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over the course… Read More ›
Robert Coover’s (born February 4, 1932) central concern is the human being’s need for fiction. Because of the complexity of human existence, people are constantly inventing patterns that give them an illusion of order in a chaotic world. For Coover,… Read More ›
Many Western readers, ignorant of Islam and Hinduism, the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, and the Pakistani civil war of 1974, may tend to read Salman Rushdie’s (born 19… Read More ›
Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) denies that the fictional world he describes in his novels is a world of fantasy. In an article about fantasy and artistic creation in Latin America, he concludes: “Reality is a better writer than… Read More ›
Many critics maintain that the impulse that prompted Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616) to begin his great novel was a satiric one: He desired to satirize chivalric romances. As the elderly Alonso Quixano the Good (if that is his… Read More ›
The name Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) conjures up images of a world without a center, of people alienated both from society and from themselves. Kafka lived at the threshold of the modern technological world, and… Read More ›
Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.