Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel Creature, Affect, Form [Hardcover]

This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and to figure intractable forms of life and affect.Introduction: After-Affects 1. Persistent Affect (Tom McCarthy, David Shields, Lars Iyer) 2. Abandoned Creatures (J.M. Coetzee) 3. Cosmopolitan Dissociation (Teju Cole) 4. Epic Failures (Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru, Russell Banks) Coda: The Descent of the Novel (James Meek) Notes Works Cited Index

Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel isan admirable piece of work, drawing on a panoply of theoretical sources,densely written and offering any scholar of contemporary fiction a splendidupdate on the latest developments in the Anglophone novel and its criticism. & thisbrilliant study invites the reader to cross boundaries of subjectivity,culture, race, systems, paradigms. (Hedwig Schwall, English Text Construction,Vol. 8 (2), Winter 2015)

An important, intellectually demanding and wide-ranging book, drawing on the most recent work in the humanities: it should be read by everyone working in the field of contemporary fiction. - Professor Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

If declarations of the novel's exhaustion have a long and illustrious pedigree, what function do pronouncements about its death play today? In this wonderful new book, Pieter Vermeulen argues that the contemporary novel is obsessed with its own insufficiency and exhaustion. In a scholarly voice as clear as it is provocative, Vermeulen argues that fiction by the likes of J. M. Coetzee and Teju Cole demonstrate the novel's obsession with its own zombie-like persistence. One measure of the novel's undeath is its endurance as something more like a form than a genre and one symptom of that uncanny survival is the development of a socialC&