Sublime desire
Subtitle: history and post-1960s fiction
By: Amy J. Elias.
Series: Parallax : re-visions of culture and society; Parallax (Baltimore, Md.)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
Subjects: Historical fiction -- History and criticism
Description: "In Sublime Desire, Amy J. Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction written since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty.

Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime - for awe, certainty, and belief."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-309) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: ONE Theory i; title: 1 Sorting Out Connections: The; title: Historical Romance in Hyper-reality 3; title: 2 The Metahistorical Romance and the; title: Historical Sublime 46; title: TWO Analysis 101; title: 3 Cracking the Mirror: Spatializing; title: History in Metahistorical Romances I03; title: 4 Metamodernity: The Postmodern Turn; title: on the Enlightenment 149; title: 5 Western Modernity versus; title: Postcolonial Metahistory I81; title: 6 Coda: The Sot-Weed Factor and; title: Mason e&Dixon 221.