For many years novelist William Gaddis, despite having won two National Book Critics Circle Awards and a MacArthur Foundation's "genius award," suffered from commercial and critical neglect. However, Gaddis has more recently experienced a resurgence in his popularity among both groups and is now considered one of the strongest American novelists. This collection of essays explores the interrelation between Gaddis's writing and the culture that helped to engender it. The essays cover such topics as technique, genre, religion, art, economics, colonialism and the role played by Gaddis's own travels through Europe and North Africa.

Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Mapping William Gaddis: The Man, The Recognitions, and His Time(CRYSTAL ALBERTS)2. The Kvetch, the Rant, and the Bitch(WILLIAM H. GASS)3. The Power of Babel: Art, Entropy, and Aporia in the Novels(CHRISTOPHER LEISE)4. Trying to Make Negative Things Do the Work of Positive Ones: Gaddis and Apophaticism(CHRISTOPHER J. KNIGHT)5. Failing Criticism: The Recognitions(JOSEPH CONWAY)6. Agape Agape: The Last Christian Novel(s)(BIRGER VANWESENBEECK)7. "A disciplined nostalgia": Gaddis and the Modern Art Object(LISA SIRAGANIAN)8. The Recognitions and Carpenter's Gothic: Gaddis's Anti-Pauline Novels(JOHN SOUTTER)9. This Little Prodigy Went to Market: The Education of(TIM CONLEY)10. Fields Ripe for Harvest: Carpenter's Gothic, Africa, and Avatars of Biopolitical Control(MATHIEU DUPLAY)11. After Gaddis: Data Storage and the Novel(STEPHEN J. BURN)Chapter NotesBibliographyAbout the ContributorsIndex