Shopping In Space - Softcover

Elizabeth Young; Graham Caveney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852422556 ISBN 13: 9781852422554

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 1992

Synopsis

Shopping in Space takes a walk on the wild side of literature to analyse contemporary New York fiction. This is a fiction of urban depravity and moral decay: greed and deviancy, crime, bohemianism, sexual excess, nightlife and narcotics. From the glittering consumer circus of up-town Manhattan to the desperate strategies of the alienated and dispossessed, the city offers unparalleled opportunities to the creative artist. Young and Caveney provide a close reading of a number of writers including Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Mary Gaitskill, Gary Indiana and Dennis Cooper. Shopping in Space is the literary history of a new generation - essential for all scholars of American literature as well as the general reader who seeks a future for fiction.

About this title

About the Author:

Graham Caveney lectures at the University of East Anglia. His articles have appeared in The Face, NME and GQ, among many others. He lives in Nottingham.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and Lynne Tillman are among the young American writers examined in this collection of essays. British critics Graham and Caveney, who deem the contemporary literary scene in England insular and petrified, are downright fawning in their admiration of U.S. authors whose work is infused with references to drugs, music videos, advertising and other manifestations of popular culture. The essays are engagingly written, and the authors correctly assert that a wide but needless gap exists between abstruse scholarly criticism and book reviews in the general media. However, they myopically believe that only fiction emanating from or set in New York City or Los Angeles speaks for or to today's youth. Moreover, there is a good deal of critical sloppiness: Graham and Caveney don't attempt to judge whether some of the writers are more talented than others, and comparisons with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett and Nathanael West are overstated. A provocative but flawed study.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1852422556
• ISBN 13: 9781852422554
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280