The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at
the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace
scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating "The Wallace
Effect"-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned
in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the
reception of his work by his contemporaries.
A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic
predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary
figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in
two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and
contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction
that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four
novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to
demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence.
By re-situating Wallace's work in a broader and more contentious
literary arena, The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the
limits of Wallace's legacy.