Rachel Cusk and the Art of Narration
Literary Criticism
Author: D. W. White || Publication Date: November 13, 2026
dwhite’s website || Essay on Arlington Park in New Critique || Review Essay on Parade in 3:AM
The Revolution Comes From Within: Rachel Cusk and the Art of Narration is the first full-length monograph about its subject, a critical examination of Rachel Cusk’s body of work. Drawing on original archival research and the author’s experiences teaching a graduate seminar on Cusk’s work, it focuses on the centrality of narration in contemporary fiction and Cusk’s place as a significant twenty-first-century writer. The book will serve as an in-depth and sophisticated analysis of her oeuvre, written with a lively approach to scholarship informed by the author’s own background as a creative writer.
The project will offer a comprehensive view of Cusk’s work at the sentence level, focused primarily on the way her books are constructed. The book will locate Cusk within the traditions of narratology and stylistics, as well as philosophical frameworks including existentialism and Wittgenstein’s theories of language, placing her novels in a critical context that will allow for a deeper understanding of her techniques and methods. It will place a specific emphasis on narration and point-of-view, and the manner in which Cusk is able to accelerate her philosophical and societal claims—especially about gender, motherhood, and identity—through her narrative techniques, a skill which makes her writing both artistically accomplished and important cultural contributions.
Within two sections divided by approach to point-of-view—first-person and third-person, in keeping with the book’s focus on narration—chapters will move chronologically, tracing the arc of Cusk’s work in each method, with an emphasis on more sophisticated analyses of her major work—namely, Arlington Park, Parade, Second Place, The Bradshaw Variations, and the Outline series. As a practicing novelist studying creative writing, White brings a fresh perspective to literary scholarship, largely bypassing top-down impositions of theory in order to approach Cusk’s work from the bottom-up, dissecting the text on the sentence level to better understand how it’s written and the way it works.
The book will suggest new taxonomies for analyzing narration and point-of-view, arguing that Cusk’s methods forge a significant link to Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. This argument reflects and redirects current conversations in literary scholarship positing a New Modernism, claiming Cusk as a Modernist, full stop, and in the process suggesting a fresh way of understanding a much-celebrated literary era.
The book will present a cogent argument and serve as a sophisticated, accessible survey, with each chapter able to stand alone as suitable for adaptation for courses on writing and literature. It will lend itself well to classroom use, written in a style at once academic and accessible, reflecting the author’s wide-ranging background. While principally concerned with narration and especially point-of-view in depicting consciousness and the inner lives of fictive characters, the book will also be cognizant of the wider implications of Cusk’s work, including the significance of her portrayal of domesticity, gender, relationship norms, and the importance of her work in literary studies of place, character, and structure.
Given Cusk’s popularity in the United States and Europe, the book will be of interest to the academic and general reader alike, although it will be written for a critically inclined audience, especially specialists in literary style, technique, and form. With its strong emphasis on textual analysis, it will be especially useful to undergraduate and graduate students of both contemporary literature and creative writing, offering a dissection of a fundamental novelistic element as employed by a leading modern writer.
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