Figures of Complexity in Contemporary Fiction
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A01=Marco Caracciolo
Author_Marco Caracciolo
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSK
Climate crisis
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
migration
new formalism
twenty-first-century fiction
world literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781399561150
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Explores the manifold ways that complexity is framed, understood and negotiated in contemporary Anglophone fiction
How does fiction—including both print books and digital literature in the video game medium—imagine the complexity of issues such as migration or climate change? How does it envisage our societies’ dependence on technological networks and supply chains that most of us don’t understand? Figures of Complexity shows how fiction pushes complexity beyond its associations with desirable nuance and instead links it to material, psychological and ethical pitfalls that are distinctive of the present moment—a sense of reality getting out of hand, being difficult or overpowering, or facing us with unsolvable moral dilemmas. Through its engagement with works by authors such as Omar El Akkad, Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi and Hanya Yanagihara, the book examines a wide range of imaginative responses to these challenges.
Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English at Ghent University, Belgium. His work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media (particularly video games). He is the author of ten books, including With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (co-authored with Karin Kukkonen, 2021), Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (2022), and Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (2022; winner of the Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative).
