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The legendary lost novel in which fourteen-year-old Preston Wildey-King must choose between his all-consuming passion for Pepsi Cola and his love for schoolmate Peggy. "He walked into the turbulent super market. There were people everywhere. His eyes swept over the shelves and stabilised on a large stack of Pepsi-colas. He could almost experience the cool fizzy liquid descending his parched throat." Written by June-Alison Gibbons when she was only 16, The Pepsi Cola Addict is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature. More than just a literary curiosity, however, this tale of a teenager whose passion for a well-known cola drink threatens to ruin his life is t...
What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fictio...
This book engages with visual and multimodal devices in twenty-first century literature, exploring canonical authors like Mark Z. Danielewski and Jonathan Safran Foer alongside experimental fringe writers such as Steve Tomasula, to uncover an embodied textual aesthetics in the information age. Bringing together multimodality and cognition in an innovative study of how readers engage with challenging literature, this book makes a significant contribution to the debates surrounding multimodal design and multimodal reading.
Style and Reader Response: Minds, media, methods profiles the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches in reception-oriented research in stylistics. Collectively, the chapters investigate how real readers, players, audiences, and viewers respond to, experience, and interpret texts. Contributions to the book investigate discourse types such as contemporary literature, poetry, political speeches, digital fiction, art exhibitions, and online news discourse. The volume also exemplifies the variety of empirical approaches in reception research, with contributors drawing on a range of methods including discussion groups, interviews, questionnaires, and think-aloud protocols with data analysed from both online and offline sources. Style and Reader Response makes an important contribution to an emerging paradigm within stylistics in which verifiable insights from readers are used to generate new models and new understandings of texts across media, with each essay demonstrating the centrality of empirical research for theoretical, methodological, and/or analytical advancements within and beyond stylistics.
Brings together many of the most influential voices in the scholarly and critical debate about post-postmodernism and twenty-first century aesthetics, arts and culture.
This edited collection brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who together offer cutting-edge insights into the complex roles, functions, and effects of pronouns in literary texts. The book engages with a range of text-types, including poetry, drama, and prose from different periods and regions, in English and in translation. Beginning with analyses of the first-person pronoun, it moves onto studies of the subject dynamics of first- and second-person, before considering plural modes of narration and how pronoun use can help to disperse narrative perspective. The volume then debates the functional constraints of pronouns in fictional contexts and finally reflects upon the theoretical advancements presented in the collection. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, stylistics and cognitive poetics, narratology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology and literary criticism.
Unfolding, turning and spinning, Kapow! is a startling new book told through Thirlwell's uniquely acrobatic voice. Taking place in the thick of the Arab Spring, this timely and incisive tale of revolution offers a clever, funny and bitingly critical cultural commentary. Using a number of spinning digressions, Thirlwell tells the stories of a group of interconnected characters in London and Egypt, each transformed by the idea of revolution.
“While books on sibling rivalry abound, [Dear Sister] brings freshness to the topic with McGhee's gentle humor and poignant scenarios…Dear indeed.” —Kirkus Reviews “A meaningful look at…siblinghood and all its foibles.” —Publishers Weekly What do you do when you have an incredibly annoying little sister? Write her letters telling her so, of course! From New York Times bestselling author Alison McGhee comes a wickedly funny, illustrated, heartwarming, and searingly honest collection of letters from an older brother to his little sister. Whininess, annoyingness, afraid of the darkness, refusal to eat lima beans, and pulling brother’s hair. These are the criteria on which little sisters are graded. Inspired by the notes Alison McGhee’s own kids would write each other, this heavily illustrated collection of letters and messages from an older brother to his little sister reveal the special love—or, at the very least, tolerance—siblings have for each other.
This open access book offers innovative and wide-ranging responses to the continuously flourishing literary phenomenon of autofiction. The book shows the insights that are gained in the shift from the genre descriptor to the adjective, and from a broad application of “the autofictional” as a theoretical lens and aesthetic strategy. In three sections on “Approaches,” “Affordances,” and “Forms,” the volume proposes new theoretical approaches for the study of autofiction and the autofictional, offers fresh perspectives on many of the prominent authors in the discussion, draws them into a dialogue with autofictional practice from across the globe, and brings into view texts, forms, and media that have not traditionally been considered for their autofictional dimensions. The book, in sum, expands the parameters of research on autofiction to date to allow new voices and viewpoints to emerge.
The last decades have seen a revival of fragmentation in British and American works of fiction that deny linearity, coherence and continuity in favour of disruption, gaps and fissures. Authors such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell and David Shields have sought new ways of representing our global, media-saturated contemporary experience which differ from modernist and postmodernist experimentations from which the writers nevertheless draw inspiration. This volume aims to investigate some of the most important contributions to fragmentary literature from British and American writers since the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on texts released in the twenty-first century. The chapters within exami...