Art, History, and Postwar Fiction Kevin Brazil 9780192557834 0192557831

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction Kevin Brazil – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780198824459,0198824459,9780192557834,0192557831

Product details:

• ISBN 10: 0192557831
• ISBN 13: 9780192557834 
• Author: Kevin Brazil

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.

Table contents:

Part 1. Pig Vomit: Beckett’s Art Historical Necessities
The Act of an Obsessional Neurotic: Beckett’s Study of Art
‘Un Amateur (Éclairé)’: Beckett the Art Critic
‘The Horror-Worn Eyes Linger Abject’: Art in the Trilogy
Part 2. Canvas in the Cold War: William Gaddis and the Context of Art
Art and Objecthood as Paintings and Shirts
Cold War as Context, Forgery as Reproduction
The Recognition of Fiction
Part 3. The Moment of History: John Berger’s Modernism After Realism
The Failure of Realism
A Painter of Our Time and New Left Literature
The Moment of Cubism: G.
Part 4. Art’s Swindle: W. G. Sebald and History After Trauma
Myth, History, and Negative Truths: Sebald’s Early Criticism
The ‘History of Looking’ and Looking at History
Austerlitz Against Trauma

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