Encyclopaedism and Totality in Contemporary Fiction

Taking as key examples work by Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Roberto Bolaño, and Karen Tei Yamashita, this book looks at engagements with encyclopaedic thought and practice in contemporary fiction. Chapters provide important new insights into the new ways that authors approach, reclaim, and use ’totality’—as a method for approaching the contemporary, rather than an object to be represented. In this, we find some of the most radical and challenging attempts in recent fiction to reimagine our world on the back of a contested history and in the face of an unstable future.

Where major studies of literary encyclopaedism have historically tended to draw from the canon, this book looks to move beyond this tradition, and pays particular attention to work from Indigenous, Asian American, and Latin American contexts. In doing so, it looks to address the challenges of reading world literature in the contemporary.