Nostalgic Postmodernism
Nostalgic Postmodernism

Author: Christian Gutleben

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9789042012974

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Why do so many contemporary British novels revert to the Victorian tradition in order to find a new source of inspiration? What does it mean from an ideological point of view to build a modern form of art by resurrecting and recycling an art of the past? From a formal point of view what are the aesthetic priorities established by these postmodernist novels? Those are the main questions tackled by this study intended for anybody interested in the aesthetic and ideological evolution of very recent fiction. What this analysis ultimately proposes is a reevaluation and a redefinition of postmodernism such as it is illustrated by the British novels which paradoxically both praise and mock, honour and debunk, imitate and subvert their Victorian models. Unashamedly opportunistic and deliberately exploiting the spirit of the time, this late form of postmodernism cannibalizes and reshapes not only Victorianism but all the other previous aesthetic movements - including early postmodernism.

Postmodern Literature and Race
Postmodern Literature and Race

Author: Len Platt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-02-19

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1107042488

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Postmodernism and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while later segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and postracial futures. With essays on a wide range of contemporary writers, including Bernadine Evaristo, Alasdair Gray, Jhumpa Lahiri, Andrea Levy, and Don DeLillo, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing.

Realism and Power (Routledge Revivals)
Realism and Power (Routledge Revivals)

Author: Alison Lee

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1317634934

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First published in 1990, this study focuses on the subversive techniques of British postmodernist fiction and examines its challenge to Realist traditions, and the liberal humanist ideology behind it. Exploring the concept of literary postmodernism, and the strategies and philosophies to which it has given rise, Alison Lee investigates how they are developed in a selection of contemporary British novels, including Midnight’s Children, Waterland, Flaubert’s Parrot, and Lanark. Postmodernism is considered in relation to history, the visual and performing arts, popular culture, including advertising, music videos, and popular fiction, notably Stephen King’s Misery. A detailed and comprehensive study, this reissue of Realism and Power will be essential reading for students of literary and cultural studies.

Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain
Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain

Author: Hywel Dix

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2011-11-03

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1441190988

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This study explores how British identity has been explored and renegotiated by contemporary writers. It starts by examining the new emphasis on space and place that has emerged in recent cultural analysis, and shows how this spatial emphasis informs different literary texts. Having first analysed a series of novels that draw an implicit parallel between the end of the British Empire and the break-up of the unitary British state, the study explores how contemporary writing in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales contributes to a sense of nationhood in those places, and so contributes to the break-up of Britain symbolically. Dix argues that the break-up of Britain is not limited to political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is also an imaginary process that can be found occurring on a number of other conceptual coordinates. Feminism, class, regional identities and ethnic communities are all terrains on which different writers carry out a fictional questioning of received notions of Britishness and so contribute in different ways to the break-up of Britain.

Flights from Realism
Flights from Realism

Author: Marguerite Alexander

Publisher: Hodder Arnold

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780713165647

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Among the questions addressed by the study are: Should fiction console (popular fiction suggests that readers want consolation, yet few postmodernist writers seem to be offering it)? Is the postmodernist period qualitatively different from earlier periods? Is postmodernism decadent? In seeking evidence on these matters, Marguerite Alexander considers the work of a number of novelists including Faulkner, Beckett, Lowry, Durrell, Golding, Nabokov, Pynchon, Fowles, Lessing, Murdoch, Vonnegutand Doctorow.