Description
In Reading Contingency: The Accident in Contemporary Fiction, David Wylot constructs an innovative study of the relationship between plotted accidents in twenty-first century British and American fiction, the phenomenology of reading, and a contemporary experience of time that is increasingly understood to be contingent and accidental. A synthesis of literary and cultural analysis, narratology, critical theories of time and the philosophy of contingency, the book explores the accident’s imagination of contemporary time and the relationship between reading and living in novels by writers including A.M. Homes, Nicola Barker, Noah Hawley, J.M. Coetzee, J.G. Ballard, Jesmyn Ward, Jennifer Egan, and Tom McCarthy.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Accident and Contingency
Part 1: Time
Chapter 1. Forwards: Accident, Event, Picaresque
Chapter 2. Backwards: Accident, Coincidence, Teleological Retrospection
Part 2: Narrative
Chapter 3. Forwards and Backwards: Reading Contingency
Part 3: Accident Narratives
Chapter 4. Radical Contingency
Chapter 5. Unassimilable Contingency
Coda
