Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction

This book focuses on the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities in modern and contemporary fiction. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), this collection examines narratives by Joyce, Mansfield, Davies, Naipaul, DeLillo, Atwood and others.

Introduction 1. Organic and Unworked Communities in James Joyce's The Dead; Pilar Villar Argáiz 2. 'Two Grinning Puppets Jigging Away in Nothingness:' Symbolism and the Community of Lovers in Katherine Mansfield's Short Fiction; Gerardo Rodríguez Salas 3. 'A Panegyric Preached Over an Empty Coffin': Waugh, or, the Inevitable End of Community; Julián Jiménez Heffernan 4. 'Being involved:' Community and Commitment in Graham Greene's The Quiet American; Paula Martín Salván 5. Doomed to Walk the Night: Ghostly Communities and Promises in the Novels of Alex La Guma; María J. López 6. The Secret of Robertson Davies' Cornish Communities; Mercedes Díaz Dueñas 7. When Strangers Are Never At Home: A Communitarian Study of Janet Frame's The Carpathians; Gerardo Rodríguez Salas 8. Communal 'Openness' to an Irreducible Outside: The Inoperative Community in Edna O'Brien's Short Fiction; Pilar Villar Argáiz 9. 'A Political Anxiety:' Naipaul, or the Unlikely Beginning of Community; Julián Jiménez Heffernan 10. 'Longing on a Large Scale:' Models of Communitarian Reconstitution in Don DeLillo's Fiction; Paula Martín Salván 11. 'I Am Not a Herald of Community:' Communities of Contagion and Touching in The Letters of J. M. Coetzee; María J. López 12. Immortality and Immunity in Margaret Atwood's Futuristic Dystopias; Mercedes Díaz Dueñas