Sponsored
Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel - by Tim Lanzendörfer
About this item
Highlights
- Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in U.S. literature.
- Author(s): Tim Lanzendörfer
- 240 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Fantasy
Description
About the Book
Examines the connection between historical and speculative fiction to offer a new form of literary-genre fiction that registers the upheavals of the early twenty-first centuryBook Synopsis
Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in U.S. literature. Discussing in depth novels by writers such as Ken Kalfus, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colson Whitehead, among others, it integrates questions of critical method, genre, form, and literary theory, all of which have some urgency today. Addressing itself to the question of how to read this mode through a form of utopian hermeneutics, this study explores the formal constitution, narrative choices, and place in the wider literary market of a mode that it believes to be constitutively important for understanding American literature's struggle with the possibility of imagining hopeful futures.
Review Quotes
Lanzendörfer gives a fascinating and persuasive account of what he calls "speculative historicism," a literary mode that deploys the logic of speculative genres to figure history in surprising new ways. He undertakes many excellent and provocative readings of important novels, providing scholars of our contemporary crisis much to ponder and debate.
--Lee Konstantinou, University of Maryland