This ebook starts a brand new and foundational dialogue of maximalism by means of investigating how the remedy of element in modern literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and improve the cultural panorama of postindustrial the US. It reviews the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, contemplating how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and highbrow wishes of up to date readers and writers. The e-book argues that maximalist novels not just exceed perceived limits of fashion, subject material, and scope, yet attempt to remake the usefulness of books in modern tradition, clean the act of studying. Levey exhibits that whereas those novels are preoccupied with element and outline, they're quite unconcerned with the conventional ambitions of illustration. in its place, they use aspect to speak specific values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and skill hooked up to the administration of advanced and over the top info. even if reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream tradition, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency within the age of automation and the net, those texts version major talents, instead of simply items of value, and inspire readers to increase conduct of examining that supplement the calls for of an more and more designated tradition. Drawing upon a various variety of theoretical colleges and cultural texts, together with factor conception, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the ebook proposes a brand new knowing of maximalist writing and a brand new method of impending the usefulness of literary items in modern tradition.