Output details

Identity and form in contemporary literature

The majority of essays in this collection originate in an international conference on ‘Identity and Form in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature’ that Sánchez-Arce organised in 2009. After the conference Sánchez-Arce invited 11 participants from 5 different countries to expand their ideas for publication. A second stage in the development of the collection saw two more contributors from North America commissioned to address specific topics. The collection is ambitious and wide-ranging, analysing how identity and form intersect in contemporary literature and revising the binary oppositions of identity-form, content-form and body-mind through discussions of the role of the author in the interpretation of literary texts, the ways in which writers bypass or embrace identity politics, and the function of identity and the body in form. Essays tackle these issues from a number of positions, including identity categories but also questioning those categories themselves. The introduction outlines the main questions posed by the essays overall, questions which go to foundational aspects of the discipline. It puts forward an original thesis of its own, arguing that identity is also form. To do this, it discusses identity in the light of current developments in neuroscience, connecting them to Foucault’s and William’s ideas of language as subjecting and causative respectively.