Theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction

Drawing on developments in critical theory and postmodernist fiction, this study makes an important contribution to the appreciation of playforms in language, texts, and cultural practices. Tracing trajectories in theories of play and game, and with particular attention to the writings of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Derrida, the author argues that the concept of play provides perspectives on language and communication processes useful both for analysis of literary texts and also for understanding the interactive nature of constructions of knowledge.

Autorentext

Brian Edwards

Inhalt

Part 1 Grasshopper Antics: The Playhouse of Language; Chapter 1 Foreplay; Chapter 2 Play: The Reader as Trickster; Chapter 3 Reader Response: The Reader as Chameleon; Chapter 4 Deconstruction: The Reader as Scheherazade; Part 2 Duplicity as Virtue: Playful Texts and Textualised Players; Chapter 5 The Play in Postmodernism; Chapter 6 Narcissus at the Edge: The Endlessly Diddling Play of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; Chapter 7 Letters to Literature: The Epistolary Artfulness of John Barth's LETTERS; Chapter 8 Strategies of Influence: Intertextual Infiltration in Robert Kroetsch's What the Crow Said; Chapter 9 Revisioning the Carnivalesque: The Cultural Combinations of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus; Chapter 10 Deceptive Constructions: The Art of Building in Peter Carey's Illywhacker Interlude; BIBLIOGRAPHY; Index;