Douglas Coupland’s Literature and Art
The Extreme Present
Andrew Tate editor Mary W McCampbell editor Dr Diletta De Cristofaro editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:13th May '27
£85.00
This title is due to be published on 13th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The first collection of scholarly essays about major works across fiction, non-fiction, and visual art by cult writer and artist Douglas Coupland, this book looks at Coupland's work and its interest in today's world, defined by social and technological acceleration, instant communications, and crises of various kinds.
Despite being widely read, Coupland is too often ignored as a subject for academic analysis, an oversight that this collection remedies. While most publications about Coupland have focussed on his fiction, this book notably gives space and attention also to his significant non-fiction and artistic production. It provides students, scholars, and fans of Douglas Coupland alike with rigorous yet accessible analyses of Coupland’s major works. The book is divided into sections which look at: Coupland’s literary production in its broader literary context; the evolution of Coupland’s artistic production; Coupland’s engagement with our extreme present; the spiritual dimension of Coupland’s works; and their temporal and spatial politics. The book closes on two exclusive interviews with Coupland.
A wonderfully inventive and thoughtful exploration of Coupland's ongoing engagement with the extreme present and the accelerated now. If Coupland's oeuvre resembles a Postmodern/posthuman/post-literate escape room, searching for a way out of ironic hell, this fine collection of ethically and politically informed essays finds keys in curiosity, empathy and sincerity, the acceptance that the present has collided with the future in ways that might open imaginative doors rather than erecting intellectual barriers. This is an invigorating, exciting and stimulating collection, vital reading for anyone interested in contemporary culture and its ambivalent relationship with capitalism and technology. * Alan Bilton, Senior Lecturer of English Literature, Swansea University *
Written by an international team of leading experts and covering the full breadth of its subject’s capacious intellectual preoccupations and aesthetic practices, Douglas Coupland’s Literature and Art is an authoritative and comprehensive account of one of our long contemporaneity’s most consistently perceptive and insightful chroniclers. Readers and viewers will find their appreciation of Coupland’s multifaceted body of work expanded by this rich, varied, and lively collection. * Paul Crosthwaite, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Edinburgh, UK *
ISBN: 9781350459410
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages