Contemporary Archival Fiction (Routledge Studies in Multimodality)

This book presents a synthesised framework for analysing archival poetics in multimodal literature, examining case studies from twenty-first-century American fiction towards elucidating the archival turn in contemporary literature more broadly. Ivansson turns her focus on multimodal archival fiction, here understood as works which engage with archival practices of collecting and organising both verbal text and visual inclusions of fictional and factual archival material, such as photographs, sketches, notes, and newspaper clippings.

The volume brings together work from multimodality, cognitive stylistics, and narratology with archival studies to demonstrate how contemporary archival fiction engages with archival themes through multimodal design. Case studies include works from Barbara Hodgson, Leanne Shapton, Valeria Luiselli, and Jacob Garbe and Aaron A. Reed. The selected examples allow for a detailed exploration of how to analyse the multimodal composition and reader experience of archival poetics. Furthermore, these case studies also elucidate how such a framework can be applied more broadly to the analysis of fictional works thematically and structurally concerned with the archive, or those that grapple with such areas of interest in contemporary research as materiality, bookishness, and ontological ambiguity.

This volume will appeal to students and scholars in multimodality, stylistics, American literature, and literary studies.

Elin Ivansson is Associate Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, where she received her PhD in English in 2023.