Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at The State University of New York, New Paltz, USA. She is the author of Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (Bloomsbury 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

A brilliant and scholarly theoretical synthesis of realism in America … Three new types of Realism are illustrated in the following chapters devoted to authors such as David Foster Wallace, Steve Tomasula, Ted Chiang, Ruth Ozeki, Don DeLillo, and an impressive number of other writers that testifies to Holland’s broad and erudite knowledge of the literary production of the new millennium … Holland draws up a particularly convincing inventory of the most recent and innovative object-texts called ‘artifacts’ or ‘assemblages’ that further dissolve the distinction between language and matter … brilliantly commented upon and analyzed. The most innovative and impressive contribution of the book, which together reveals Holland’s talents for fine reading, theoretical elaboration, and research, appears in the final chapters on quantum realism and DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001) in particular, of which she delivers a masterful interpretation and an exciting study of the manuscripts available at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin … A luminous, dense, complex, and convincing book that should be read by every student interested in ‘post-postmodern’ fiction and theory.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsPreface: The Problem of "Realism"Introduction: A Brief History of Realisms1. Metafictive Realism: David Foster Wallace and the Future of (Meta)Fiction 2. The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Fiction of Steve Tomasula3. Material Realism and New Materialism in Literature from the 1990s to the Present4. Quantum Realism: On Ted Chiang’s "Story of Your Life" and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being 5. Quantum Realism Case Study: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist Conclusion: Realism and Periodizing after PostmodernismBibliographyIndex