Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Add to GoodReads

Paul Auster's Ghosts

The Echoes of European and American Tradition

María Laura Arce Álvarez

The following book explores the intertextual relationship between Paul Auster’s first and most remarkable work, The New York Trilogy (1987), and the works of certain American and European writers who shaped this novel and Auster’s future works. Auster’s The New York Trilogy is a novel formed by an intertextual dialogue which in some cases it is explicit, mentioning authors and books intentionally, and in others implicit, provoked by Auster’s admiration for authors such as Samuel Beckett or product of his role as a translator, as it occurs with Maurice Blanchot. These two different ways of intertextuality essentially show Auster’s influence of the American Renaissance, Samuel Beckett’s fiction and the work of the writer and critic Maurice Blanchot. In these terms, this book proposes an exhaustive analysis of City of Glass and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Ghosts and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” and The Locked Room and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe. The two last chapters also offer a thorough analysis of the whole trilogy in comparison to Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable and finally introduces a study of the trilogy as a fictionalization of Maurice Blanchot’s literary theory.

Lexington Books

Pages: 188 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-6163-1 • Hardback • June 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6165-5 • Paperback • August 2020 • $47.99 • (£37.00)

978-1-4985-6164-8 • eBook • June 2018 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Popular Literature

Paul Auster's Ghosts

The Echoes of European and American Tradition

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

The following book explores the intertextual relationship between Paul Auster’s first and most remarkable work, The New York Trilogy (1987), and the works of certain American and European writers who shaped this novel and Auster’s future works. Auster’s The New York Trilogy is a novel formed by an intertextual dialogue which in some cases it is explicit, mentioning authors and books intentionally, and in others implicit, provoked by Auster’s admiration for authors such as Samuel Beckett or product of his role as a translator, as it occurs with Maurice Blanchot. These two different ways of intertextuality essentially show Auster’s influence of the American Renaissance, Samuel Beckett’s fiction and the work of the writer and critic Maurice Blanchot. In these terms, this book proposes an exhaustive analysis of City of Glass and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Ghosts and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” and The Locked Room and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe. The two last chapters also offer a thorough analysis of the whole trilogy in comparison to Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable and finally introduces a study of the trilogy as a fictionalization of Maurice Blanchot’s literary theory.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 188 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-6163-1 • Hardback • June 2018 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6165-5 • Paperback • August 2020 • $47.99 • (£37.00)

978-1-4985-6164-8 • eBook • June 2018 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Popular Literature

Author

María Laura Arce Álvarez is assistant professor of American literature at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Paul Auster’s Metafiction and Intertextuality in Context
2. The Writer and the Typist: City of Glass and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville
3. The Writer and his Doubles: Ghosts and “William Wilson” by Edgar Allan Poe
4. The Invisible Writer: The Locked Room and Fanshawe by Nathaniel Hawthorne
5. The Trilogy of Absence: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable
6. Translating Influence: The New York Trilogy as a Fictionalization of Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature
Afterword

Paul Auster's Ghosts

The Echoes of European and American Tradition

María Laura Arce Álvarez

Paul Auster's Ghosts

The Echoes of European and American Tradition

ALSO AVAILABLE