Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction [Hardcover]

In Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction, David Wylot constructs an innovative study of the relationship between plotted accidents in twenty-first century British and American fiction, the phenomenology of reading, and a contemporary experience of time that is increasingly understood to be contingent and accidental. A synthesis of literary and cultural analysis, narratology, critical theories of time and the philosophy of contingency, the book explores the accidents imagination of contemporary time and the relationship between reading and living in novels by writers including A.M. Homes, Nicola Barker, Noah Hawley, J.M. Coetzee, J.G. Ballard, Jesmyn Ward, Jennifer Egan, and Tom McCarthy.

Introduction: Accident and Contingency

Chapter 1. Forwards: Accident, Event, Picaresque

Chapter 2. Backwards: Accident, Coincidence, Teleological Retrospection

Chapter 3. Forwards and Backwards: Reading Contingency

Chapter 4. Radical Contingency

Chapter 5. Unassimilable Contingency

Coda

In Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction, David Wylot constructs an innovative study of the relationship between plotted accidents in 21st century British and American fiction, the phenomenology of reading, and a contemporary experience of time that is increasingly understood to be contingent and accidental.

Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporaló;