Character and Satire in Post War Fiction by Ian Gregson (9781847062659)
Character and Satire in Post War Fiction by Ian Gregson (9781847062659)
Character and Satire in Post War Fiction (Book)
Ian Gregson Release Date: June 2008 Format: Paperback Pages: 192 ISBN: 9781847062659 ISBN-10: 1847062652
This book, new in paperback, offers new readings of novels by major British and American postwar novelists.This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. A 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.
