Combining conceptual rigour with sensitive close reading, Ward reclaims encyclopaedic fiction's radical potential to resist dominant worldviews and offer (and lay the groundwork for) critical tools enabling writers and readers to jointly imagine new forms of universality, rooted in accountability and relationality.

Textual Practice

Encyclopaedism and Totality in Contemporary Fiction offers a compelling and precisely situated treatment of totality, reification, and the encyclopedic impulse animated by their dialectic. Through inductive readings of late DeLillo, Silko, Bolaño, and Yamashita, Ward builds the case that contemporary encyclopedic novels aspire toward contingent views of totality from within. Best of all is the book's account of how these fictions redirect encyclopedic attention from the distinguished to the disregarded. At once meticulous and generous, comprehensive and anti-completist, Ward's study belongs on the same shelf as the works it so deeply understands.

Paul K. Saint-Amour, author of 'Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form'

An erudite, groundbreaking and decolonising account of the history of encyclopaedism and the encyclopaedic novel. Through close reading of a breathtaking range of world texts, Kiron Ward makes a brilliant case for how the genre's self referential interrogation of the conditions of and relations between knowledge and power now provides a compelling lens through which to examine new and complex interrelationships between identity politics, labour relations, race, environmentalism, and the new digital revolution.

Pat Waugh, Professor Emerita in the Department of English Studies, University of Durham, UK