Children of Silence: On Contemporary FictionAn engaging series of reflections on the literary landscape of our time -- from the writings of Roland Barthes to those of Stephen King -- Wood explores such issues as the shift of interest from novel to story, the blurring of the line between fiction and criticism, the persistence of the notion of paradise, the lure of horror, and the tendency of fiction both to reflect and to resist contemporary history. Wood casts his net wide: a brilliant dissection of Beckett's prose comedy is followed by an absorbing sequence of essays on Kundera, Calvino and García Márquez. Chapters on Toni Morrison and on Angela Carter lead us to chapters on Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson. |
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Barthes's Barthes/by Roland Barthes Cabrera Infante called Calvino cards Carter characters clichés Cortázar criticism Crossed Destinies culture dark Dead Imagine death dream English Etsuko everything evoked feel fiction García Márquez genre gesture girl happy human idea Ill Seen Ill images jazz joke Julio Cortázar kind Kublai Khan language literature live look Marco Polo means memory metaphor Milan Kundera mind Morrison Nabokov narrative narrator never notion novel novelist Palomar paradise perhaps phrase play possible prose Proust question reader Reinaldo Arenas Roland Barthes Roland Barthes/by Roland roman romanesque Ryder Said's Samuel Beckett says seems sense Sexing the Cherry silence sort speak Stephen King story suggests T. S. Eliot talk tell terror Testaments Betrayed things thought Three Trapped Tigers tion trans Unbearable Lightness understand voice Winterson woman wonder words writing York young