Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature

Rezensionen / Stimmen

In this groundbreaking work, Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez retraces the teleological view of literature through a wide expanse of texts, both narrative and of literary criticism - from Homer to Aristotle, Tasso and Schiller - before delineating how certain authors of modern literature rejected linearity in favour of circular forms of narrative. Built on Nietzschean philosophy, particularly on his idea of eternal recurrence, the book's close engagement with writers and dramatists, ranging from Strindberg to Nabokov, Joyce, Borges and Calvino, radically reconfigures the aesthetics grounding these texts. This brilliant account adds an important dimension to the evolution of the Western narrative. * Thirthankar Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India, and co-editor of Samuel Beckett as World Litertature * Far from a mere typology, Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature is both ambitious in scope and quite original in dealing with its central premise. Toribio Vazquez offers a personal attempt to present and understand the many different circular alternatives probed by the 20th-century writers under the spell of Nietzsche's negative philosophy, a milestone for the contemporary collapse of linearity. His close readings compose an engaging picture of modernism(s) in Europe, sensitive to singularities and also particularly attentive of non-canonical names, such as Azorin and Kharns. A fine, comprehensive study, theory and analysis concerned. * Fabio de Souza Andrade, Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil * In this wide-ranging comparative study Toribio Vazquez extends our understanding of post-Nietzschean poetics. His corpus of canonical and non-canonical 20th-century writers exploit structures of circularity for a variety of purposes, from the axiological and psychological to the existential and self-referential. This is an ambitious and impressive piece of work. * Duncan Large, Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia, UK *