Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel.(Book Review)

From: Studies in the Novel | Date: December 22, 2005| Author: | Copyright information

WOOD, JAMES. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. 320pp. $24.00.

This second collection of essays from celebrated British critic James Wood brings together pieces written between 1999 and 2003 and first published in various journals, including The New Republic and The New Yorker. In his Acknowledgements, Wood describes the book as proposing a kind of secular response to the more explicitly theological arguments of his earlier critical work, The Broken Estate (1999); in fact, the interplay in the novel genre between ...

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