What is the role of the author in times of crisis? Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form examines how Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee developed literary strategies in common to cope with crisis periods they were anticipating, living through, or looking back on. Matthew Cheney outlines how the three writers shaped their art to create an author/audience relationship congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy espoused by such thinkers as Paulo Freire and bell hooks. Seeking to stimulate ethical thought, Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee required their readers to be active interpreters of their texts' forms, contents, and contexts. By pushing against fiction's fictionality, these writers of very different backgrounds, geographies, privileges, situations, tastes, and styles discovered complex ways to address the world wars in England, the AIDS crisis in New York, and apartheid in South Africa, going so far as to question the value of fiction itself.

Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany's work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as "About 5,750 Words" and "To Read The Dispossessed" first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.

What is the role of the author in times of crisis? Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form examines how Virginia Woolf, Samuel R. Delany, and J. M. Coetzee developed literary strategies in common to cope with crisis periods they were anticipating, living through, or looking back on. Matthew Cheney outlines how the three writers shaped their art to create an author/audience relationship congruent with the goals of critical pedagogy espoused by such thinkers as Paulo Freire and bell hooks. Seeking to stimulate ethical thought, Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee required their readers to be active interpreters of their texts' forms, contents, and contexts. By pushing against fiction's fictionality, these writers of very different backgrounds, geographies, privileges, situations, tastes, and styles discovered complex ways to address the world wars in England, the AIDS crisis in New York, and apartheid in South Africa, going so far as to question the value of fiction itself.