The Geographies of David Foster Wallace’s Novels: Spatial History and Literary Practice

The Geographies of David Foster Wallace’s Novels takes a fresh look at David Foster Wallace’s novels through the lens of historical geography. It explores the connections between Wallace’s literary practice and the reshaping of American geographical space that resulted from the transition between Fordist and post-Fordist forms of capitalism, presenting critical readings of the novels together with analysis of manuscripts and notebooks from Wallace’s archive. Deploying an innovative methodology that combines aspects of cultural geography and literary criticism, each novel is historically situated through a spatial keyword, expanding our understanding of the connections between social context and formal innovation in Wallace’s work.

Laurie McRae Andrew completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, and specialises in contemporary fiction and literary geographies. His essays have appeared in the forthcoming David Foster Wallace in Context (Cambridge University Press), Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Literary Geographies.