The quiet contemporary American novel

This book explores the concept of quiet an aesthetic of narrative driven by reflective principles and argues for the terms application to the study of contemporary American fiction. In doing so, it makes two critical interventions. Firstly, it maps the neglected history of quiet fictions, arguing that from Hester Prynne to Clarissa Dalloway, from Bartleby to William Stoner, the Western tradition is filled with quiet characters. Secondly, it asks what it means for a novel to be quiet and how we might read for quiet in an American literary tradition that critics so often describe as noisy. Examining recent works by Marilynne Robinson, Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, among others, the book argues that quiet can be a multi-faceted state of existence, one that is communicative and expressive in as many ways as noise but filled with potential for radical discourse by its marginalisation as a mode of expression.

Rachel Sykes is Lecturer in Contemporary American Literature at the University of Birmingham

Introduction 1 The quiet novel2 9/11 and the aesthetic of noise in contemporary fiction 3 Quiet in time and narrative 4 The quiet novel of cognition5 The novel of (dis)quietConclusionBibliographyIndex