In fiction,
you-narratives written in the last decade across the world parody the form of second-person address found in advertising, self-help and ‘how-to’ books while anticipating shame and culpability. To establish the significance of affect, this book returns to second-person narrative theory’s neglected origins in the theory of autobiography.
This book examines the use of
you across media: novels and memoirs by Paul Auster, Carmen Maria Machado, Alejandro Zambra, Vendela Vida, Christine Angot, Clarice Lispector, Charles Yu, and Caleb Azumah Nelson; poems by Claudia Rankine and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s play and television series
Fleabag (2016–19).
These texts are brought into dialogue with narratology, philosophy, literary criticism and critical race theory to illustrate how the second-person pronoun’s capacity to address the real-world reader inevitably renders such narratives a site for political and ethical contestation.
| Format |
Inbunden |
| Omfång |
256 sidor |
| Språk |
Engelska |
| Förlag |
Edinburgh University Press |
| Utgivningsdatum |
2025-10-31 |
| ISBN |
9781399546959 |
