Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II - Hardcover

Crosthwaite, P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0230202950 ISBN 13: 9780230202955

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Synopsis

The radical, 'postmodernist' waves of experimentation that swept Anglo-American fiction from the late 1960s constitute a delayed response to the upheavals of the Second World War, yet the legacy of the war barely figures in prevalent accounts of the postmodernist movement. As Paul Crosthwaite shows in this provocative book, to recognize the significance of the war in contemporary culture is to acknowledge that postmodernism, as a sensibility, aesthetic style, and mode of thought, must be entirely reconceived. Challenging dominant theorizations of the postmodern as depthless and dehistoricized, Crosthwaite demonstrates that postmodernism has not abandoned history but has rather reformulated it in terms of trauma, trauma that is traceable, time and again, to the catastrophes of the 1940s. The book stages a revealing confrontation between influential theories of trauma and postmodernism and offers innovative close readings of key texts by Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Richard Powers and Ian McEwan.

About this title

Review:

'Written with élan, clarity and confidence, this book is at the cutting edge of "second generation" postmodernism: ethically serious, historically aware, theoretically and critically informed. In this outstanding piece of literary research, Crosthwaite has found a way of articulating both a vital influence on contemporary culture and an important historical debt.' – Professor Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; author of The Holocaust and the Postmodern

Book Description:

The first sustained study of the relationship between Anglo-American postmodernist fiction and the Second World War

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0230202950
• ISBN 13: 9780230202955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 229