Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring ...
Read More
Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.
Read Less
Add this copy of Art, History, and Postwar Fiction (Oxford English to cart. $100.54, new condition, Sold by Prior Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Cheltenham, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2019 by Oxford University Press.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
New in New jacket. Size: 0x8x5; Dark blue hardback with gilt lettered spine, complete with original dustjacket. In new condition: firm and square with strong joints, no bumps, no rubs. Contents are crisp, tight and clean; no pen-marks. Thus a very nice copy that looks and feels unread, now offered for sale at a very reasonable price.
Add this copy of Art, History, and Postwar Fiction to cart. $102.87, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2018 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Art, History, and Postwar Fiction (Oxford English to cart. $163.54, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2019 by Oxford University Press.
Add this copy of Art, History, and Postwar Fiction (Oxford English to cart. $231.63, new condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2019 by Oxford University Press.