Interrogating the basic assumptions of realism, this study examines the postmodern phenomenon of fiction as the presentation of theories of fiction. The writers critically examined include Nabokov, Woolf, Conrad, Faulkner, Joyce, and Beckett.

“This debut novel about an Irish expat millennial teaching English and finding romance in Hong Kong is half Sally Rooney love triangle, half glitzy Crazy Rich Asians high living—and guaranteed to please.” —Vogue A RECOMMENDED BOOK FROM: The New York Times Book Review * Vogue * TIME * Marie Claire * Elle * O, the Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * Esquire * Harper's Bazaar * Bustle * PopSugar * Refinery 29 * LitHub * Debutiful An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than "I like you a great deal." Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her. And then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong... Should Ava return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith? Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting Times is thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.

Three prominent social thinkers discuss how modern society is undercutting its formations of class, stratum, occupations, sex roles, the nuclear family, and more. Reflexive modernization, or the way one kind of modernization undercuts and changes another, has wide ranging implications for contemporary social and cultural theory, as this provocative book demonstrates.

Introduction - C. Henke: Self-Reflexivity and Common Sense in A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy: Eighteenth-Century Satire and the Novel - C. Goer: Wie Tyrann Amor seine Meisterin fand: Die Geburt des Individuums aus dem Geist der Musik in Wilhem Heinses Musikroman Hildegard von Hohenthal - H. Breuer: John Keats' Ode To Autumn als Metapoesie - H. Zapf: Structure, Chaos, and Self-Reference in Edgar Allan Poe - U. Böker: "A raid on the inarticulate:" Hawthorne, Hopkins, Hofmannsthal - T. Fischer-Seidel: Archetypal Structures and Literature in Joyce's Ulysses: Aristotle, Frye, and the Plot of Ulysses - P. Freese: Trouble in the House of Fiction: Bernard Malamud's The Tenants - B. Hesse: "The moo's an arrant thief" - Self-Reflexivity in Nabokov's Pale Fire - W. Huber: "Why this farce, day after day?" On Samuel Beckett's Eleuthéria - L. Volkmann: Explorationen des Ichs: Hanif Kureishis post-ethnische Kurzgeschichten - P. Lenz: Talking-Cures oder Tall Stories? The (Dis)Establishing of Reality in Conor McPherson's The Weir - A. Merbitz: The Art of Listing: Selbstreflexive Elemente in Nick Hornbys High Fidelty - A.Nünning: Fictional Metabiographies and Metaautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metagenres - M. Middeke: Self-Reflexivity, Trans-/Intertextuality, and Hermeneutic Deep-Structure in Contemporary British Fiction - A. H. Kümmel: Mighty Matryoshka: Zum Konzept der fraktalen Person - M. Markus: Tu put it shortly: Abkürzungen, reflektiert am Beispiel englischer und deutscher Eigennamen - R. Weskamp: Selbstreflexion und Fremdsprachenerwerb

Self-reflection is fundamental for human thinking on many levels. Philosophy has described the mind's capacity to observe itself as a core element of human existence. Political and social sciences have shown how modern democracies depend on society's ability to critically reflect on their own values and practices. And literature of all ages has proven self-reflexivity to be a crucial trait of cultural production. This volume provides the first diachronic panorama of genres, forms, and functions of literary self-reflection and their connections with social, political and philosophical discourses from the 17th century to the present. Far beyond the usual focus on postmodernist opacity, these contributions present a rich tradition of critical transparency: Literary texts that show us what is behind and beyond them.

What do young people want from life? This book shows how the 'internal conversation' guides individual choices.

This unusually innovative book treats reflexivity, not as a philosophical conundrum, but as a practical issue that arises in the course of scholarly research and argument. In order to demonstrate the concrete and consequential nature of reflexivity, Malcolm Ashmore concentrates on an area in which reflexive "problems" are acute: the sociology of scientific knowledge. At the forefront of recent radical changes in our understanding of science, this increasingly influential mode of analysis specializes in rigorous deconstructions of the research practices and textual products of the scientific enterprise. Through a series of detailed examinations of the practices and products of the sociology of scientific knowledge, Ashmore turns its own claims and findings back onto itself and opens up a whole new era of exploration beyond the common fear of reflexive self-destruction.