000			02358nam a22002297a 4500
005			20260807151543.0
008			260807b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780192893321
028			_a: Technical Bureau India Pvt. Ltd. _b: 4794/23, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi _c: TB1322 _d: 1/8/2026
082			_a809 DAN
100			_aDancer, Thom.
245			_aCritical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction _c/ Thom Dancer.
260			_aUnited Kingdon _b: Oxford University Press _c, 2021.
300			_avii, 204p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b7673
520			_aFrom climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity can feel impossible to solve. Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction argues that contemporary fiction helps those who may feel despair at the enormity of such problems — not, as usually assumed, through the ambitious search for grand solutions but rather by cultivating a temperament of modesty. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves. Through readings of Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee, and David Mitchell, Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction advances a claim for the value of temperament in general as a crucial analytic for understanding contemporary experience as well as for a particular temperament of critical modesty as crucial in negotiating the limits of critical and human agency that constitute our daily lives. Exploring modest forms of entangled human agency that represent an alternative to the novel of the large scale that have been most closely associated with the Anthropocene, this volume makes the surprising case that by adopting a modest stance, the novel has the potential to play a more important socio-cultural role than it has done. In doing so, it offers an engaging response to the debate over critical and surface readings, bringing novels themselves into the conversation and arguing for a fictional mode that is both critical and modest, reminding us how much we are already engaged with the world, implicated and compromised, before we start developing theories, writing stories, or acting within it.
650			_aLiterature
650			_aHistory & Criticism
650			_aFiction
700			_aThom Dancer.
942			_cBOOK
999			_c70644 _d70644