The Wallace Effect

"The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating 'The Wallace Effect' the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries. A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two…