Overview
- Discusses international classics as well as works by lesser-known authors
- Draws on cutting-edge research in the field, offering a new interpretation of literary theory and literature as theory
- Argues that literature does not merely quote, stage, or mock theory, but forges theory in its own right
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Keywords
- Literary Thoery
- Novel
- Postmodern Literature
- German Literature
- Italian Literature
- French Literature
- British and Irish Literature
About this book
This book offers an analytical model for the interpretation of theory-informed novels – American, English, French, German, and Italian – from the past 50 years. Works discussed include Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Patricia Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, David Lodge’s Small World, and Juli Zeh’s Dark Matter. Erik Schilling shows how these works not only incorporate elements of theory in playful, intertextual ways, but productively work with theory – for instance, by elaborating the complexities of the roles of author and reader or by confronting the quest for meaning with an infinite network of signs. Schilling argues that the novels do not merely adopt theory; they create theory – and this theorizing literature requires new forms of interpretation.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Erik Schilling teaches German and Comparative Literature at the University of Munich, Germany. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard and Oxford and, in 2020, he was awarded the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz prize of the German Research Foundation. He is the author of Authenticity: The Career of a Longing (2020) and The Historical Novel since Postmodernism: Umberto Eco and German Literature (2012).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Theorizing Literature
Book Subtitle: Literary Theory in Contemporary Novels – and Their Analysis
Authors: Erik Schilling
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-53325-9Due: 23 May 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-53328-0Due: 23 May 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-53326-6Due: 23 May 2024
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 205
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations