Modernist Futures Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel [Hardcover]

This book examines what innovation means to novelists today by reading their work in dialogue with the modernist tradition.Placing questions of form centre stage in this examination of contemporary fiction's ethical and political engagements, David James shows how the myriad possibilities of modernism continue to be realized by the most innovative writers today.Placing questions of form centre stage in this examination of contemporary fiction's ethical and political engagements, David James shows how the myriad possibilities of modernism continue to be realized by the most innovative writers today.In Modernist Futures, David James examines the implications of modernism's continuity in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing by tracing its political and ethical valences in emerging novelistic practices. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, and Phillip Roth, James reconsiders the purpose of literary innovation as it relates to the artistic and cultural interventions such writers perform. By rethinking critical and disciplinary parameters, James brings scholarship on contemporary fiction into dialogue with modernist studies, offering a nuanced account of narrative strategies that sheds new light on the form of the novel today. An ambitious and incisive contribution to the field, this book will appeal especially to scholars of modernism and contemporary literary culture as well as those in American and postcolonial studies.Acknowledgements; Introduction: contemporary fiction and the promise of modernism; 1. 'Advancing along the inherited path': making it traditionally new in Milan Kundera and Philip Roth; 2. 'The perfect state for a novel': Michael Ondaatje's Cubist imagination; 3. 'Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world': J. M. Coetzee's politics of minimalism; 4. 'The dead hand of modernism': Ian McEwan, reluctant impressionist; 5. 'License to strut': Toni Morrison and the ethics of virtuosity; NotlÃ(