Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation

ISBN-13: 9780198789758 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 288 str.

David James

Recenzje

To console us is one of the oldest tasks of literature, but it is also, of late, one of the most neglected. Literature should challenge us, estrange us, beguile us, but very few make the case that it should make us feel better. David James' brilliantly subtle and poetically attentive book responds to this critical lacuna, by offering a new way of understanding how today's literature consoles. There is nothing sentimental about this book — James does not offer a cosy picture of the redemptive qualities of the literary imagination; rather he addresses some of the contemporary writers whose work is most difficult, most uncompromising. But in doing so, he produces a startlingly original way of thinking about how the beauty of style overcomes some of the deprivations it witnesses, an account of the reparations of literary form that will have a transformative effect on how we think about the contemporary novel.

O autorze

David James is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, before which he was Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Author, most recently, of Modernist Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2012), his edited volumes include The Legacies of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Modernism and Close Reading (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is Associate Editor for the journal Contemporary Literature, and for Columbia University Press he co-edits the book series 'Literature Now'.