Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women, Part I

In a 2000 review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, critic James Wood dismissed the genre of big, ambitious novels -which he claimed were too dense with information to express any authentic feeling-as hysterical realism. The contributors to these special issues take Wood’s derisive claims as a rallying cry to examine encyclopedic or maximalist novels by women published in the past two decades, including works by Emil Ferris, Valeria Luiselli, Ruth Ozeki, Alexis Wright, Olga Tokarczuk, Lucy Ellmann, Madeleine Thien, Anna Burns, Marisha Pessl, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis. They demonstrate how these authors repurpose a literary form long associated with expansive masculinity to identify and critique conditions that result in sexist harm. These issues are among the first to acknowledge the wealth and number of these kinds of novels by women and explore how authors apply techniques of literary maximalism to feminist interests.

Contributors. Maheen Ahmed, Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Bradley J. Fest, Courtney Jacobs, Shiamin Kwa, Patricia Stuelke, Sian White, Marjorie Worthington, James Zeigler