This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term "Surfiction" for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

This book examines how, beginning in the 1960s up to the present, a new type of fiction was created in America, but also in Europe and Latin America, in response to the cultural, social, and political turmoil of the time. The author has coined the term “Surfiction” for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

This hands-on guide to advanced critical analysis and argumentation will help readers to communicate in way that is orderly, rigorously supported, persuasive and clear. It demonstrates how criticality can be paired with creativity to produce an insightful and engaging piece of research, and explores how narrative styles and rhetorical devices can be used to boost the persuasiveness of an argument. Chapters blend theory with practice and contain a wealth of activities designed to help students put new skills into practice or revitalise those they already have. This is an essential resource for postgraduates and advanced undergraduates looking to hone their skills in critical analysis and communicate their ideas with precision and clarity.

This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.

Theory in the "Post" Era brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the “post” era. Since the Cold War's end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath - and sometimes just the “after” - of whole paradigms, the crisis or “passing” of anthropocentrism, the twilight of an entire ontological and cultural “condition,” as well as the corresponding rise of an antagonist model, of an “anti,” “meta,” or “neo” alternative, with examples ranging from “posthumanism” and “post-postmodernism” to “post-aesthetics,” “postanalog” interpretation or “digicriticism,” “post-presentism,” “post-memory,” “post-“ or “neo-critique,” and so forth. It is no coincidence, the contributors to this volume argue, that this “post” moment is also a time when theory is practiced as a world genre. If theory has always been a “worlded” enterprise, a quintessentially communal, cross-cultural and international project, this is truer at present than ever. Perhaps more than other humanist constituencies, today's theorists work and belong in a theory commons that is transnational if still uneven economically, politically, and otherwise. Theory in the "Post" Era reports the results of Romanian theory experiments that join efforts made in other places to foster a theory for the “post” age.

Bringing together scholars who have critically followed New Formalism's journey through time, space, and learning environment, this collection of essays both solidifies and consolidates New Formalism as a burgeoning field of literary criticism and explicates its potential as a varied but viable methodology of contemporary critical theory.

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading—and its power to consume and enchant—more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures. Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Burney’s The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.