Resumen de Introduction: Big Novel Ambition without Apology
This introduction to the first of two special issues on “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty‐First‐Century Women” describes the investigation of feminist literary maximalism. A summary and critical response to James Wood's influential negative review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, the introduction objects to his designation “hysterical realism” to characterize Smith's and other writer's publishing novels in the genre that literary scholarship has called encyclopedic, systems, maximalist, mega, and novels of information. The current debate in literary studies over the methods of postcritique and critique is referenced in order to recommend the issue's articles as models of an intermediate approach: generous reading. Described as an affirmative mode of interpretation that matches the tenor of postcritique, generous reading retains the central importance of critique by attending to the ways in which texts enact critique through the resources of literary form. Generous reading interprets novels as critique. The final section presents summaries of each article's argument about exemplary big, ambitious novels.
