Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres

Since the late 1950s, writes James R. Lawler in his Foreword to this volume, Morrissette has stood as one of the most incisive explicators of the nouveau roman, of its past and present affiliations, of its interaction with the cinema. The influential essays collected in Novel and Film display a wide range of critical and analytic approaches to the narrative aspects of the two genres. For all the variety of their subjects, from constructional forms such as interior duplication and game play to intertextual parallels with mathematics and topology, these essays together define a unified critical perspective, one that has brought fresh precision to the analysis of narrative techniques and that continues to raise questions of prime importance to contemporary fiction. Included is a complete bibliography of Morrissette's scholarly works.