The Novel Today
The Novel Today

Author: Malcolm Bradbury

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780719006777

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Britain's most important contemporary authors reflect intelligently and imaginatively on the nature and development of the modern novel.

Postmodernizing the Holocaust
Postmodernizing the Holocaust

Author: Marta Tomczok

Publisher: V&R unipress

Published: 2024-01-22

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 373701678X

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Marta Tomczok presents all Polish postmodern novels about the Holocaust, starting with “The First Splendor” by Leopold Buczkowski and ending with “The Suspected Dybbuk” by Andrzej Bart. She also presents their rich relationships with selected foreign-language prose, which intensified especially at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The culmination of the entire trend is a discussion around two novels: “Tworki” by Marek Bieńczyk and “Fly Trap Factory” by Andrzej Bart, which reveals the aestheticizing and post-memorial profile of Polish postmodernization and its advantage over the historiosophical trend. This monograph is not only the first such collection of post-Holocaust postmodern novels, but also the first comprehensive study of postmodernism in the literature about the Holocaust, which, thanks to comparative analysis, tries to analyze and explain the circumstances of the appearance and later disappearance of this trend from cultural landscape of the world and Poland.

The Writer's Crusade
The Writer's Crusade

Author: Tom Roston

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1683359240

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The story of Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five, an enduring masterpiece on trauma and memory Kurt Vonnegut was twenty years old when he enlisted in the United States Army. Less than two years later, he was captured by the Germans in the single deadliest US engagement of the war, the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken to a POW camp, then transferred to a work camp near Dresden, and held in a slaughterhouse called Schlachthof Fünf where he survived the horrific firebombing that killed thousands and destroyed the city. To the millions of fans of Vonnegut’s great novel Slaughterhouse-Five, these details are familiar. They’re told by the book’s author/narrator, and experienced by his enduring character Billy Pilgrim, a war veteran who “has come unstuck in time.” Writing during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam conflict, with the novel, Vonnegut had, after more than two decades of struggle, taken trauma and created a work of art, one that still resonates today. In The Writer’s Crusade, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Vonnegut’s life and Slaughterhouse-Five. Did Vonnegut suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Did Billy Pilgrim? Roston probes Vonnegut’s work, his personal history, and discarded drafts of the novel, as well as original interviews with the writer’s family, friends, scholars, psychologists, and other novelists including Karl Marlantes, Kevin Powers, and Tim O’Brien. The Writer’s Crusade is a literary and biographical journey that asks fundamental questions about trauma, creativity, and the power of storytelling.

And So It Goes
And So It Goes

Author: Charles J. Shields

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2011-11-08

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 142997379X

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A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011 The first authoritative biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writer who changed the conversation of American literature. In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no ("A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer"). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: "O.K." For the next year—a year that ended up being Vonnegut's last—Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters. And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut's concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut's works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

The Necessary Blankness
The Necessary Blankness

Author: Mary Allen

Publisher: Urbana : University of Illinois Press

Published: 1976

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780252005190

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Women in major American fiction of the 1960s.

Sublime Desire
Sublime Desire

Author: Amy J. Elias

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-04-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0801875439

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Co-winner of the Perkins Prize from the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature Has twentieth-century political violence destroyed faith in historical knowledge? What happens to historical fiction when history is seen as either a form of Western imperialism or a form of postmodern simulation? In Sublime Desire, Amy Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history, and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty. Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime—for awe, certainty, and belief. Sublime Desire is an eloquent melding of theory and practice. Mixing the canonical with the unexpected, Elias analyzes developments in the historical romance genre from Walter Scott's novels to novels written today. She correlates developments in the historical romance to similar changes in historiography and philosophy. Sublime Desire draws engagingly on more than thirty relevant texts, from Tolstoy's War and Peace to Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, Charles Johnson's Dreamer, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. But the book also examines theories of postmodern space and time and defines the difference between postmodern and postcolonial historical perspectives. The final chapter draws from trauma theory in Holocaust studies to define how fiction can pose an ethical alternative to aestheticized history while remaining open to pluralism and democratic values. In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.