Title: The spaces of violence
First published: 2006
Description: "James R. Giles examines 10 contemporary American novels for the unique ways they explore violence and space as interrelated phenomena. These stories take place in settings as diverse as small towns, college campuses, suburbs, the brokerage houses and luxury apartments of Wall Street, football stadiums, Appalachian hills, and America's no-man's-land of Greyhound bus stations and highways. Violence, Giles finds, is mythological and ritualistic in many of these novels, whereas it is treated as systemic and naturalistic in others. Giles locates each of the novels he studies on a continuum from the mythological to the naturalistic and argues that they represent a "fourthspace" at the margins of physical, social, and psychological space, a territory at the cultural borders of the mainstream. These textual spaces are so saturated with violence that they suggest little or no potential for change and affirmation and are as degraded as the physical, social, and mental spaces from which they emerge. A concluding chapter extends the focus of The Spaces of Violence to texts by Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, and Chuck Palahniuk, who treat the destructive effects of violence on family structures."--Jacket.
Subjects: Violence in literature, Personal space in literature, Space and time in literature, History and criticism, Space (Architecture) in literature, American fiction, American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS374.V58 G548 2006