The giant of literary theory analyzes the novel: Conrad, James, Atwood, Oe, Mailer, Grass, Grossman, Garcia Márquez, Gibson, Knausgaard and more

A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try-and sometimes manage-to awaken our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, revealing a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and a class or community. But even if this happens (which is rare), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the awakened feeling of inter-connection. And since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, there is an urgent need to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these areas.

This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politics of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the Soviet Union and beyond. This is a voyage traversing the globe, discovering a common kinship between each literary destination in late capitalism itself.

"Jameson has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms." - London Review of Books

"The most muscular of writers." - Times Literary Supplement

"Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does." - London Review of Books