The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino Book

The South African writer André Brink is no stranger to novels, having written several himself. In The Novel, however, he turns his attention to analyzing fiction, not creating it. Brink's own work might best be described as literary realism; in A Dry White Season, he chronicled the horror of apartheid and its dreadful effect on both whites and blacks. In Imaginings of Sand, he explored South Africa's slow transition to democracy. Yet The Novel is a celebration of postmodernism, in which language becomes both the subject and the medium for literature. Though postmodernist literary theory is relatively young, Brink argues that its practice goes back to the very roots of the novel, starting with 16th-century Miguel De Cervantes's Don Quixote and continuing on up through 20th-century author Italo Calvino. He applies his theories to the classic novels of Flaubert, Austen, and Defoe, among others, then moves to modern writers such as Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez, and A.S. Byatt. Though Brink's analysis of these newer novelists is both acute and interesting, it is the unique reading he brings to the classics of previous centuries that makes The Novel novel. Read More

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  • Product Description

    "The novel, Brink argues, is not about representation but the self-conscious play of language. From its inception, he suggests, the genre has been about the act of writing and self-reflection. This thesis is not new but is part of the currency of postmodern literary theory. Brink, himself a noted South African novelist, the author of some 12 books, including A Dry White Season (1984), and a university professor, brings the insight of an insider. He surveys 15 celebrated novels, historically arranged from Don Quixote and La Princesse de Cleves to A.S. Byatt's Possession and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter Night a Traveller examining each in terms of its play with writing and language. His discussions are marked by clarity, insight, and comprehension. A valuable book."
    --Thomas L. Cooksey, Library Journal

    "What a treat to explore the novel as a genre through the lucid eyes of André Brink, himself one of the world's foremost novelists! I particularly enjoyed the way in which the most traditional novels were revealed as contemporary and entirely relevant."
    --Ariel Dorfman

    The postmodernist novel has become famous for the extremes of its narcissistic involvement with language. In this challenging and wide-ranging new study, André Brink argues that this self-consciousness has been a defining characteristic of the novel since its inception. Taking as his starting point "the propensity for story" embedded in all language, he demonstrates that the old familiar novels may be the more startlingly modern, while postmodernist texts remain more firmly rooted in convention.

    From the beginnings of the genre with Don Quixote, through "classic" novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and modern and postmodern texts of the twentieth, Brink performs a sweeping analysis of 500 years of the novel, including Moll Flanders, Emma, Madame Bovary, The Trial, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Possession. As an internationally recognized novelist, he brings a unique critical eye and enthusiasm to his exploration of the genre, offering the reader a refreshing and rewarding introduction to the novel and narrative theory.

  • 0814713300
  • 9780814713303
  • Andre Brink
  • 31 March 1998
  • New York University Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 288
  • First Edition
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