The Wallace Effect: David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination

Marshall Boswell

Jan 2019 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating “The Wallace Effect”-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries.

A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence.

By re-situating Wallace's work in a broader and more contentious literary arena, The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the limits of Wallace's legacy.

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Marshall Boswell is Professor and Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA. He is the author of four books, including Understanding David Foster Wallace (2004) and John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion (2001), and the editor of three books, including David Foster Wallace and 'The Long Thing' (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (co-editor, 2013). He served as Guest Editor for a two-part special issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to David Foster Wallace's novels.