Peripheralizing DeLillo

Providing us with a startling new reading of Don DeLillo's oeuvre, from his very earliest short stories to his late minimalism, Thomas Travers' book is, however, far more than simply a great study of one of the most important U.S. novelists of our time. It is also one of the most significant books on Marxist literary theory and on the contemporary novel's responses to economic crisis, financialization and the dynamics of dispossession that has been published this century. A major advance in our understanding of the novel's attempts to grapple with the challenges to representation posed by contemporary capitalism. * David Cunningham, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Westminster, UK * Answering some big questions about the postmodern hypothesis from the ground zero of its ruin, this book sets out to reinvent DeLillo as a novelist of the anonymously dispossessed masses whose multitude defines our historical present. The DeLillo that emerges from these pages is less the exemplar of postmodernism in fiction than he is a prophet of dissent, a prescient thinker and artist whose writings conjoin the dominant characterological tendency of literary fiction since the 1960s with the social antagonism we are now seeing on the streets, writing its own epic in the language of rage and fire. * Mark Steven, Senior Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature, University of Exeter, UK * DeLillo is not the archetypal postmodern novelist we believed him to be, but an epic poet of the dispossessed, cartographer of the surplus populations thrown off by the 'long downturn', his fictions striving to re-historicize capitalism's cast-offs as emergent subjects of History: such is Travers's original and compelling thesis. The book effects a wholesale reconceptualization of the Jamesonian problematic of postmodernism, rewriting the relation of politics and form for the era of secular stagnation via Deleuze and Guattari's untapped notion of peripheralization: it is a critical triumph and a superlative work of Marxist literary theory. * Daniel Hartley, Assistant Professor in World Literatures, Durham University, UK *