Raymond Carver's fiction is widely known for its careful documentation of lower-middle-class North America in the 1970s and 80s. Building upon the realist understanding of Carver's work, Raymond Carver's Chronotope uses a central concept of Bakhtin's novelistics to formulate a new context for understanding the celebrated author's minimalist fiction. G. P. Lainsbury describes the critical reception of Carver's work and stakes out his own intellectual and imaginative territory by arguing that Carver's fiction can be understood as diffuse, fragmentary, and randomly ordered. Offering a fresh analysis of Carver's body of work, this book offers an extensive meditation on this major figure in postmodern U.S. fiction.

G.P. Lainsbury

Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 The Cultural and Aesthetic Construction of the Writer in a Depressed America; Chapter 3 Wilderness and the Natural in Hemingway and Carver; Chapter 4 Alienation and the Grotesque Body in the Fiction of Franz Kafka and Raymond Carver; Chapter 5 The Function of Family in the Carver Chronotope; Afterword;