David James is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. Among his other books are Sentimental Activism (2026) and Modernist Futures (2012), along with edited volumes such as Modernism and Close Reading (2020), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (2015), and The Legacies of Modernism (2012). He is an editor at Contemporary Literature and is founding co-editor of the Columbia University Press series Literature Now.

In the face of illness, grief, trauma, catastrophe -- why write? Can consolation be found in works that seem to be about inconsolability? These are the urgent questions that propel David James' remarkable study of twenty-first century narrative fiction and memoir. The answers that James provides do full justice to the emotional depth as well as the analytic complexity of a body of contemporary writing that ranges from Kazuo Ishiguro to J.M. Coetzee, from W.G. Sebald to Joan Didion, from Marilynne Robinson to David Grossman... This is a book that skillfully and rewardingly attends to the micro-effects of prosody, while forging a new direction for the critical understanding of elegy, grief writing, trauma studies and post-modern fiction.

• Introduction: Consolation's Discrepant Forms 1: Fetched from Oblivion 2: Description as Redress 3: Elegy Unrestored 4: The Religion of Style 5: Life-Righting and Magical Thinking 6: Apprehensive Alleviation 7: Walking with the Unconsoled Epilogue: Bribes of Aesthetic Pleasure?

David James is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. Among his other books are Sentimental Activism (2026) and Modernist Futures (2012), along with edited volumes such as Modernism and Close Reading (2020), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (2015), and The Legacies of Modernism (2012). He is an editor at Contemporary Literature and is founding co-editor of the Columbia University Press series Literature Now.

In the face of illness, grief, trauma, catastrophe -- why write? Can consolation be found in works that seem to be about inconsolability? These are the urgent questions that propel David James' remarkable study of twenty-first century narrative fiction and memoir. The answers that James provides do full justice to the emotional depth as well as the analytic complexity of a body of contemporary writing that ranges from Kazuo Ishiguro to J.M. Coetzee, from W.G. Sebald to Joan Didion, from Marilynne Robinson to David Grossman... This is a book that skillfully and rewardingly attends to the micro-effects of prosody, while forging a new direction for the critical understanding of elegy, grief writing, trauma studies and post-modern fiction.

• Introduction: Consolation's Discrepant Forms 1: Fetched from Oblivion 2: Description as Redress 3: Elegy Unrestored 4: The Religion of Style 5: Life-Righting and Magical Thinking 6: Apprehensive Alleviation 7: Walking with the Unconsoled Epilogue: Bribes of Aesthetic Pleasure?

David James is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. Among his other books are Sentimental Activism (2026) and Modernist Futures (2012), along with edited volumes such as Modernism and Close Reading (2020), The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (2015), and The Legacies of Modernism (2012). He is an editor at Contemporary Literature and is founding co-editor of the Columbia University Press series Literature Now.

In the face of illness, grief, trauma, catastrophe -- why write? Can consolation be found in works that seem to be about inconsolability? These are the urgent questions that propel David James' remarkable study of twenty-first century narrative fiction and memoir. The answers that James provides do full justice to the emotional depth as well as the analytic complexity of a body of contemporary writing that ranges from Kazuo Ishiguro to J.M. Coetzee, from W.G. Sebald to Joan Didion, from Marilynne Robinson to David Grossman... This is a book that skillfully and rewardingly attends to the micro-effects of prosody, while forging a new direction for the critical understanding of elegy, grief writing, trauma studies and post-modern fiction.

• Introduction: Consolation's Discrepant Forms 1: Fetched from Oblivion 2: Description as Redress 3: Elegy Unrestored 4: The Religion of Style 5: Life-Righting and Magical Thinking 6: Apprehensive Alleviation 7: Walking with the Unconsoled Epilogue: Bribes of Aesthetic Pleasure?