Robert Coover: The metaphysics of bondage

Coover has been read almost exclusively as a metafictionist. This ignores his penchant for the grotesque and the fabric of values that make up Northrop Frye's demonic vision. This article analyses the operations of the grotesque in Coover's fiction, shows how the demonic vision distributes the grotesque throughout all the books despite their extraordinarily different surface content, and then focuses on the metaphysical image of bonds, against which Coover struggles. That image belongs to the demonic world, but also represents the rules of genre that his famous metafiction contests. The article relates Coover's work to a dozen or more contemporary writers.