Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)
Sublime Desireconstitutes a major contribution to the growing body of work on contemporary historical fiction... a must for those who wonder about the pervasivenessof history in comtemporary literature.(Luc HermanReview of Contemporary Fiction)Elias sets out to deepen our understanding of the ethical and political power of the historical romance, then and now... By the end of the book, however, she gives us much more than a thorough literary history. She gives us an increasingly intense investigation of how we might engage an ethics that resists the modern and the nostalgic.(Nancy JesserSouthern Humanities Review)Fresh perspectives on the relationship between literature and traumatic historical experiences, historical truth and literary imagination, memory and narrative.(Laura SavuSymploke)These arguments are well stated and clear, and Elias's book is worth consulting.(Jeremy TamblingYearbook of English Studies)Elias not only offers a compelling analysis of postwar fiction but also reconciles much existing postmodern theory... Lucidly written, richly textured, and commandingly researched throughout.(Timothy MelleyPynchon Notes)As someone who has written on the topics of history, postmodernism, and fiction, it is with great pleasure that I can honestly say that this book has made me seriously rethink my most cherished conceptions about this broad field of theoretical endeavor.(Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto, President of the Modern Language Association of America (2000))Elias manages to catch the postmodern intellectual zeitgest.(Christoph HenkeAnglia)