Character and Satire in Post War Fiction

This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known postwar novelists including Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter and Will Self, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.>

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
1. Subverting Racist Caricature: Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison
2. Joseph Heller's Allegories of Money
3. Philip Roth's Vulgar Aggressive Clowning
4. Joyce Carol Oates' Political Anger
5. Muriel Spark's Puppets of Thwarted Authority
6. Magic Realism As Caricature: Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie
7. The Caricaturist as Celebrity: Martin Amis and Will Self
8. Caricature Verus Character: The Self as Cartoon
Bibliography
Index

Über den Autor / die Autorin

Ian Gregson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wales, Bangor.

Ian Gregson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Wales, Bangor. He is the author of Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism, The Male Image: Representations of Masculinity in Postwar Poetry and Postmodern Literature.

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Ian Gregson, Gregson Ian, Daniel Herwitz
• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Fester Einband
• Erschienen: 13.01.2006
• EAN: 9780826487476
• ISBN: 978-0-8264-8747-6
• Seiten: 192
• Serien: Literary Studies; Continuum Literary Studies; Literary Studies
• Themen: Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form