Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Community in Twentieth Century Fiction is the first systematic study on the role that modern and contemporary fiction has played in the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), the essays in this collection examine narratives by Joyce, Waugh, Greene, LaGuma, Mansfield, Davies, O'Brien, Naipaul, DeLillo, Coetzee, Frame and Atwood.

Through the integrated articulation of notions such as finitude, openness, exposure, immunity and death, we aim at uncovering the strategies of communal figuration at work in modern and contemporary fiction. Most of these strategies involve a rejection of organic communities based on essentialist fusion and an inclination to dramatize 'inoperative communities' (Nancy) of singularities aware of their own finitude and exposed to that of others.

Paula Martín Salván is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Cordoba, Spain. Previous publications include research on Modernist and Postmodernist authors such as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.

Gerardo Rodríguez Salas is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Granada, Spain. Previous publications include work on literary theory and twentieth-century women's fiction (Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Janet Frame, Angela Carter, Carmel Bird). He is also the author of three books on Katherine Mansfield.
 
Julián Jiménez Heffernan is Professor of English Literature at the University of Cordoba, Spain. Research interests include amongst others narrative discourse, comparative literature, deconstruction and political theory. Recent publications include articles on theory and narrative.

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