Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable

From dust jacket notes: "Ambrose Bierce has attracted serious readers for over a hundred years with little help from criticism. Idiosyncratic in his own time as well as ours, Bierce did not fit the conventional categories of naturalism and realism and has not fit most categories since. Yet his merit has never been in doubt to many other authors. In America, Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane considered him a master; internationally, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Julio Cortazar, and Jorge Luis Borges consciously imitated him. Cathy N. Davidson reassesses Bierce as a fictional experimentalist whose stories reveal surprisingly modern views on the nature of language and the relationship between language, perception, and fictional forms. Avoiding clichés of literary history and criticism, she carefully balances postmodern aesthetic theories with the philosophical influences Bierce absorbed - primarily Charles Sanders Peirce - to identify the nature of his achievement. Bierce's texts anticipate the postmodern period, and Davidson lays the foundation for serious scrutiny of an eminent precursor of postmodern literature...."