"Written in an engaging and lively style, Edward's analyses of the fiction are eminently readable... Durham's theoretical prose requires of readers an effort that is generously rewarded by the pleasure afforded by the display of complex intellectual debate." -- the Comparist "...quite impressive in its close and clever analyses of theories of play in the five novels." -- Choice
Part 1 Grasshopper Antics: The Playhouse of Language; Chapter 1 Foreplay; Chapter 2 Play: The Reader as Trickster; Chapter 3 Reader Response: The Reader as Chameleon; Chapter 4 Deconstruction: The Reader as Scheherazade; Part 2 Duplicity as Virtue: Playful Texts and Textualised Players; Chapter 5 The Play in Postmodernism; Chapter 6 Narcissus at the Edge: The Endlessly Diddling Play of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; Chapter 7 Letters to Literature: The Epistolary Artfulness of John Barth's LETTERS; Chapter 8 Strategies of Influence: Intertextual Infiltration in Robert Kroetsch's What the Crow Said; Chapter 9 Revisioning the Carnivalesque: The Cultural Combinations of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus; Chapter 10 Deceptive Constructions: The Art of Building in Peter Carey's Illywhacker Interlude; BIBLIOGRAPHY; Index;