Kirjahaku

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.

Exploring the lives of artists and writers from the past, current discourse around queerness and his own experiences, Kevin Brazil argues that art and literature needs to move away from celebrating the pain of queerness and embracing all the positive, ecstatic, collective joy that queer culture produces.

History, Time, and the Novel Since 1945 offers a new account of the relationship between history and the novel in the postwar period. The latter decades of the twentieth century saw many critics proclaim the 'end of history', and many novelists turn to metafiction to demonstrate the difficulties of representing the historical past. This emphasis on history as a question of textual representation, however, has overlooked the ways in which novelists have engaged with history as an experience of time. Drawing on theorists of history's recent 'temporal turn', this book argues that the novel's capacity to mediate experiences of time through form and style enables it to express the multiplicity of history temporalities through which historical change takes place. Ranging widely across British, American, African, and Caribbean literature, this book demonstrates that bringing close readings of style and form into dialogue with theorizations of historical time can provide a new account of what a historical novel can be.