I’ve chosen Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell as the focus of my research. Published in 2004, the book connects widely different genres and writing styles from 19th century travel logs to post-apocalyptic fiction in a way that is somewhere in between a pastiche and an anthology.

The reason I chose this book is that I’m very interested in post-modernism though my understanding of the concept is still a bit hazy. This book is interesting in that it draws from the writes styles of different time periods (including predictions of future styles in two cases) and the clichés and tropes of those time periods to play on the reads expectations. Most of my research then would be to explore the possible origins of those clichés, or at least some texts that may have influenced the style used in each section of the book.