Free Indirect The Novel in a Postfictional Age

Free Indirect The Novel in a Postfictional Age by Timothy Bewes, published by Columbia University Press in 2022.

Everywhere today, we are urged to "connect." Literary critics celebrate a new "honesty" in contemporary fiction or call for a return to "realism." Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of twentieth-century writing--E. M. Forster's "Only connect . . ." and Fredric Jameson's "Always historicize!"--helped establish connection as the purpose of the novel and its reconstruction as the task of criticism. But what if connection was not the novel's modus operandi but the defining aesthetic ideology of our era--and its most monetizable commodity?

A lovely addition to your coffee table or bookshelf, and a thoughtful gift.

• Author: Timothy Bewes
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2022
• Pages: 315
• ISBN: 9780231192972