Overview

In fiction, you-narratives written in the last decade across the world parody the form of second-person address found in advertising, self-help and 'how-to' books while anticipating shame and culpability. To establish the significance of affect, this book returns to second-person narrative theory's neglected origins in the theory of autobiography. This book examines the use of you across media: novels and memoirs by Paul Auster, Carmen Maria Machado, Alejandro Zambra, Vendela Vida, Christine Angot, Clarice Lispector, Charles Yu, and Caleb Azumah Nelson; poems by Claudia Rankine and Phoebe Waller-Bridge's play and television series Fleabag (201619). These texts are brought into dialogue with narratology, philosophy, literary criticism and critical race theory to illustrate how the second-person pronoun's capacity to address the real-world reader inevitably renders such narratives a site for political and ethical contestation.

Full Product Details

Author:   Denise Wong (Postdoctoral researcher, Justus Liebig University Giessen)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399546959

ISBN 10:   1399546953
Pages:   256
Publication Date:   31 October 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction to You-Narration Part I. Time and Affect 1. Disnarrating You in Andrew Cowan’s Your Fault (2019) 2. Seeing You as Another: Shame and the Gaze in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016–19) 3. Narrating Oneself as Another: Autobiographical Writing in the Second Person Part II. The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion 4. Ironising Choice in You-Narration: Hypertext and Self-Help Fiction 5. Negotiating Gendered Subjectivity through Self-Effacement, Self-Creation and Self-Aggrandisement 6. Racialisation and Masculinity in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water (2021) and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2019) Coda: Future Directions for the Study of You-Narration Bibliography Index

Reviews

Denise Wong's new book on shame and 'you-narratives' is deeply researched and highly insightful. Theoretically informed and critically astute, the book offers sensitive explorations of narratological properties and structures, as well as nuanced discussions of the political and ethical workings of the use of 'you' across a range of cultural forms and discourses.--Ben Davies, University of Portsmouth

Author Information

Denise Wong is a postdoctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, working on the UKRI project, ‘Reading Post-Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Cognition, and Technology in the Twenty-First Century’. She is also Reviews Co-Editor of C21: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Her work has been published in Textual Practice, the Journal of Asian American Studies, DIEGESIS and The Problems of Literary Genres. She has contributed chapters to the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel, Narrative Intersubjectivity and Storyworld Possible Selves and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Cognitive Studies.

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