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This book studies the importance, the uses, and the changes in the work of genre in the contemporary novel. By looking at both the current interest in popular genres in literary writing, as well as at the currently ongoing changes to traditional genres, this book develops a broader perspective that suggests the value of genre criticism.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Generic Turn? Toward a Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel.
Part One. Genre at the End of Postmodernism
1 Aliens in America: Toni Morrison, Steven Spielberg, and the Ends of Postmodernism
Philipp Löffler
2 The Digital Intensification of Postmodern Poetics
Lai-Tze Fan
3 The Black Box of Genre in Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Stephen Hock
4 Self-Parody and the Aesthetics of Literary Transgression in John Hawkes's An Irish Eye and Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
Salwa Karoui-Elounelli
5 Sincerity, Sharing, and Authorial Discourses on the Fiction/Nonfiction Distinction: The Case of Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity
Virginia Pignagnoli
Part Two. High and Low, Literary and Popular
6 Techno-Anxiety and the Middlebrow: Science-Fictionalization in the Fictional Mainstream of the Early Twenty-First Century
Roger Bellin
7 Post-Apocalypse Now-Cormac McCarthy's The Road as Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Yonatan Englender and Elana Gomel
8 Ghostly Presences: Nostalgia, the Literary Market, and the Cultural Work of Genre in Stephen King's Joyland
Clemens Spahr
9 Postmodern Autonomy and the Poetics of Genre in Matt Ruff's Novels
Annette Schimmelpfennig and Tim Lanzendörfer
10 Purposing the Familiar: Genre, Repetition, and Anxiety in Breat Easton Ellis's Lunar Park
Gavin F. Hurley
Part Three. Revisiting Traditional Genre(s)
11 The Heirs of Don Quixote: Representations of the World-Shaping Powers of Genre in Contemporary Fiction
Martina Allen
12 Reimagining Genre in the Contemporary Immigrant Novel.
Katie Daily-Bruckner
13 Looking Beneath the Surface: Self and Genre in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland
Tim De Jong
14 Connecting Travel Writing, Bildungsroman, and Therapeutic Culture in Dave Eggers's Literature
Robert Mousseau
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index
About the author
By Tim Lanzendörfer
Summary
This book studies the importance, the uses, and the changes in the work of genre in the contemporary novel. By looking at both the current interest in popular genres in literary writing, as well as at the currently ongoing changes to traditional genres, this book develops a broader perspective that suggests the value of genre criticism.
