Shame in Contemporary You-Narration

Argues that temporality and affect are critical dimensions of the proliferation of second-person narratives in the twenty-first century

• Recovers autobiography as a crucial but historically neglected component in second-person narrative studies
• Analyses a diverse range of textual and visual narratives, including novels, memoirs, poems and both the play and television adaptation of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag
• Explores the politics of choice in choose-your-own-adventure narratives as well as the politics of inclusion and exclusion enacted via the gendering and/or racialisation of you
• Makes a significant contribution to contemporary literary studies, by bringing narratology, affect theory and philosophy to bear on the unexamined intersection of shame, race, gender and temporality in you-narratives

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 (2016–19). 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.