Books by Jay Clayton

In this important contribution to the poetics of fiction Dr Jay Clayton examines the way the Romantic visionary moment alters narrative structure in the novel. This study provides the first account of the relationship between Romanticism and the English novel, giving detailed attention to the formal issues of genre and representation, as well as to the social and ethical assumptions that govern apparently formal considerations. Informed by literary, psychoanalytic and narrative theory, Romantic Vision and the Novel is written in a clear and forceful style that will help many readers come to terms with these difficult subjects. Through detailed and original interpretations of works by Richardson, Austen, Emily Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot and Lawrence, Clayton establishes the importance for what they can reveal about each other and for what their relationship reveals about the larger functional of literature in society.

Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Hélène Cixous, Alfonso Cuarón, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.

Time and the literary: the immediacy of information technology has supposedly annihilated both. Email, cell phones, satellite broadcasting seem to have ended the long-standing tradition of encoding our experience of time through writing. Paul de Man's seminal essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity" and newly commissioned essays on everything from the human genome to grammatical tenses argue, however that the literary constantly reconstructs our understanding of time. From eleventh-century France or a science-fiction future, Time and the Literary shows how these two concepts have been and will continue to influence each other.

The Pleasures of Babel acquaints the layperson and the expert alike with the creative and intellectual achievements of America's multicultural society. Arguing that the present is "a great period of writing," Jay Clayton relates novels from the seventies, eighties, and nineties to the latest developments in literary theory. He offers a lucid, cutting-edge look at the often stormy relationship between contemporary literature and criticism. Avoiding theoretical jargon, Clayton systematically sets out to make sense of the critical movements of the last two decades: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, minority writing, multiculturalism, and feminism. In the course of clarifying the accomplishments of Barthes, Kristeva, Lyotard, Said, and others, the author discusses some of America's most prominent writers of fiction: Saul Bellow, Sandra Cisneros, E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, and many others. The result successfully weds a layperson's guide to recent criticism with a scholarly application of that criticism to the very works it concerns. In light of the current debates being waged over the canon and multiculturalism, The Pleasures of Babel should prove an indispensable tool for those engaged in the practice of literary criticism, as well as anyone concerned with the way in which narrative interacts with society.

This collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory - influence and intertextuality. The study of influence tends to centre on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as sources or contexts for a given author. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history and social practices as well as other literary works. In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this volume considers the relationship between these two terms across the whole range of their usage.