Michael Basseler Livres

Focusing on the ways in which contemporary fiction and new genres of the novel are entangled with a variety of societal challenges and concerns, the aim of this volume is to provide students, university teachers, and literary scholars with a compact overview of the US-American novel in the first two decades of the new millennium. What are the dominant themes and recurring topics of recent American novels? How can the cultural dynamics of literary change in contemporary fiction be conceptualized, and what are the institutional, political, economic, cultural, ecological, and social contexts that have driven generic change in the American novel in the last fifteen to twenty years? What authors – established and new – have shaped the course of the novel in the 21st century? What are the most influential novels of the new millennium thus far, and how have they responded to, altered, and complicated our very notion of ‘the American novel’? The chapters in this handbook aim to address these questions in a manner that is at once systematic, clearly structured, and deliberately pluralistic and open, particularly with regard to the theoretical and methodological frameworks applied.

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Can fiction teach us how to live? This study offers a fresh take on the North American short story, exploring how the genre has engaged in the construction and circulation of 'life knowledge'. Echoing the resurgence of short story scholarship in recent years, it thus contributes a genre-focused perspective to the growing field of 'literature and knowledge' studies. Drawing on stories from the late 19th century to the present by authors such as Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Junot Díaz, and Alice Munro, Michael Basseler examines how knowledge about life and how to live it is generically constituted and, vice versa, how literary genres such as the short story are embedded in broader cultural frameworks of knowledge production.

This volume sets out from the assumption that emergent forms of life find some of their most complex and challenging expressions in literature. Arguably, literary forms have always played an important role in giving form to life; they raise important questions about which forms of life are desirable or valuable, they imagine alternative life-forms, and they aesthetically embody the tensions between various conflicting forms of life. As understood here, then, the concept ‘forms of life’ refers at once to cultural life-forms and to the literary forms and styles that incorporate and interrogate them. Covering a wide range of Anglophone literary texts, the essays in this volume strive towards a critical analysis of the links between stylistic devices, formal procedures, and narrative techniques, on the one hand, and emergent forms of life, on the other. By reframing and theorizing the Wittgensteinian concept of ‘forms of life’ from a literary-critical perspective, the volume aims to enlarge the conceptual and interpretative repertoire of literary and cultural studies and to furnish the study of narrative fiction as well as of other genres with new descriptive and analytical resources.

With the recent renaissance in genre theory and history, understanding the transformations within and between genres has become crucial. Literary genres can be viewed as families of texts, sets of norms, repertoires of devices, or social contracts between authors and readers, among other frameworks. It is evident that genres are dynamic, yet despite the various approaches to explaining generic change, scholars have not provided systematic overviews or closely examined the emergence of new genres to test these theories. This volume aims to illuminate the processes involved in what can be termed 'the cultural dynamics of generic change.' It emphasizes that genres are shaped not only by changes within the literary system but also by cultural factors and contexts. The first part of the volume theorizes these dynamics, offering systematic overviews and new hypotheses. The second part explores a diverse range of fictional genres within and beyond British and American literature, highlighting the interplay between literary and extra-literary influences in shaping genre evolution.

This handbook aims to provide students, teachers, and other readers with a concise survey of the American short story from its early beginnings to the first decade of the 21st century. At the same time, it critically reflects the many intricacies and problems involved in the writing of literary history and canon formation. In contrast to the many introductions to the American short story that focus primarily on individual authors, the order of contributions is based roughly on the diachronic sequence of what can be considered as the major eras of the genre, with the emphasis on the dominant thematic and formal developments of the time. The chapters offer a series of introductions to the major (sub-)genres as well as model interpretations of stories that serve as paradigm examples of these (sub-)genres. They thus present a broad overview of key periods, genres, and writers as well as in-depth analyses of selected stories. Moreover, both the volume as a whole and the individual chapters attempt to provide students with a large collection of texts, topics, and analytical techniques that can be adopted and expanded in the process of exam preparation. The authors discussed in this volume include such ‘classic’ short story writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and Eudora Welty as well as contemporary authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, Simon Ortiz, Nicole Krauss, and many others.