Abstract
In a number of recent British novels, readers encounter startlingly hyperbolic representations of characters and settings, indicative of an ambition to represent the human condition comprehensively. This essay reads this phenomenon in the context of recent critical commentary on the novel that has engaged with various kinds of universalisms (‘hysterical realism,’ ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘cosmodernist’ novels, and ‘traumatological’ fiction). It suggests that the texts discussed here, Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), and McEwan’s Solar (2010), do not (only) aim at negotiating the place of individuals in globalized society and the dread of impersonal catastrophes, but at spelling out an anthropology: by way of autopoetological self-valorization, literature is presented as a prime medium of human relations to the world, answering to an essential anthropological deficiency.
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©2014 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- ‘The Saving Power of Hallucination’: Elizabeth Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance
- Here Comes Everybody: Anthropological Hyperbole in Some Recent Novels
- Maya Angelou: A Trickster’s Tale
- Surrealism as Theme and Method in Olga Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov
- A Dignifying Shame: On Narrative, Repetition, and Distance in Anne Carson’s Nox
- Alice Munro: Nobelpreisgekrönte Meisterin der Short Story aus Kanada
- Book Reviews
- Darwin’s Bards. British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution
- A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative
- Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature
- Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830–1870
- Intermedial Storytelling: Thematisation, Imitation and Incorporation of Photography in English and American Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century
- A.S. Byatt
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 62 (2014)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- ‘The Saving Power of Hallucination’: Elizabeth Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance
- Here Comes Everybody: Anthropological Hyperbole in Some Recent Novels
- Maya Angelou: A Trickster’s Tale
- Surrealism as Theme and Method in Olga Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov
- A Dignifying Shame: On Narrative, Repetition, and Distance in Anne Carson’s Nox
- Alice Munro: Nobelpreisgekrönte Meisterin der Short Story aus Kanada
- Book Reviews
- Darwin’s Bards. British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution
- A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative
- Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature
- Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830–1870
- Intermedial Storytelling: Thematisation, Imitation and Incorporation of Photography in English and American Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century
- A.S. Byatt
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 62 (2014)