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John Barth (Critical Survey of Long Fiction)

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While John Barth’s novels have ensured his eminence among contemporary American writers, his short fictions have been no less influential or controversial. In addition his novels, he published a collection of shorter works, Lost in the Funhouse (1968), the technical involutions of which plumb the nature of narrative itself and disrupt conventional relationships between teller and tale. Barth also wrote two essays of particular significance. In “The Literature of Exhaustion,” he discusses those writers whose suspicion that certain forms of...

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