A01=Denise Wong
Affect
Author_Denise Wong
Category=DN
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSK
contemporary literature
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
narrative theory
second-person narration
shame
temporality
Product details
- ISBN 9781399546959
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Denise Wong is a postdoctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, working on the UKRI project, ‘Reading Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Cognition, and Technology in the Twenty-First Century’. She is also Reviews Co-Editor of C21: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Her work has been published in Textual Practice, the Journal of Asian American Studies, DIEGESIS and The Problems of Literary Genres. She has contributed chapters to the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel, Narrative Intersubjectivity and Storyworld Possible Selves and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Cognitive Studies.
