Novel Arguments

Novel Arguments deals with American innovative (postmodern, metafictional, experimental) fiction since the 1960s. It argues that innovative fiction extends our way of thinking about the world, rejecting the critical consensus that homogenises this fiction, under the rubrics of postmodern and metafiction, as autonomous and self-absorbed. The supposed symptoms of innovative fiction’s autonomy - its characteristics of play, self-consciousness, and immanence - are reconsidered as integral to its means of engagement. The book closely examines the readings of five important innovative novels by Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Kathy Acker and shows how they achieve an effective articulation of their concerns by virtue of their innovation, which is aimed at a making new of fictional cognition.

• A new interpretation of American innovative fiction • A challenge to the conceptual homogenisation of postmodernism • A theoretical account of the relation between innovation and engagement

Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. The idea of innovative fiction; 2. How to succeed: Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father; 3. A man’s story is his gris-gris: Cultural Slavery, Literary Emancipation and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada; 4. Narrative inscription, history, and the reader in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning; 5. One’s image of oneself: structured identity in Walter Abish’s How German Is It; 6. The quest for love and the writing of female desire in Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote; Conclusion; Notes; Index.