Abstract

This volume sets out from the assumption that emergent forms of life find some of their most complex and challenging expressions in literature. Arguably, literary forms have always played an important role in giving form to life; they raise important questions about which forms of life are desirable or valuable, they imagine alternative life-forms, and they aesthetically embody the tensions between various conflicting forms of life. As understood here, then, the concept 'forms of life' refers at once to cultural life-forms and to the literary forms and styles that incorporate and interrogate them. Covering a wide range of Anglophone literary texts, the essays in this volume strive towards a critical analysis of the links between stylistic devices, formal procedures, and narrative techniques, on the one hand, and emergent forms of life, on the other. By reframing and theorizing the Wittgensteinian concept of 'forms of life' from a literary-critical perspective, the volume aims to enlarge the conceptual and interpretative repertoire of literary and cultural studies and to furnish the study of narrative fiction as well as of other genres with new descriptive and analytical resources.