A Companion to David Foster Wallace

Criticism of the work of David Foster Wallace has tended to be atomistic, focusing on a single aspect of individual works. A Companion to the Work of David Foster Wallace is designed as a professional study of all of Wallace's creative work. With essays written by both top scholars in the field and exciting newcomers, the volume is anchored by a set of essays that provide detailed readings of each of his major works of fiction, including three novels and three story collections. Interwoven through these half-dozen single-text studies are thematic-based essays that address larger segments of Wallace's achievement via an eclectic range of critical environments, including mathematics, the spatial turn in contemporary criticism, gender theory, the legacy of American Pragmatism, and the emergent field of post-postmodern literary studies.

Marshall Boswell is Professor and Chair of the department of English at Rhodes College, USA. He is the author of Understanding David Foster Wallace, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion, Trouble with Girls, a short story collection, and Alternative Atlanta, a novel. He served as a guest editor for a two-part special issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to Wallace's work as a novelist.
Stephen J. Burn is Associate Professor of English at Northern Michigan University, USA. He is the author of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide and Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism, the editor of Conversations with David Foster Wallace, and the co-editor of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. He is currently editing a volume of David Foster Wallace's letters