Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War

Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War

Löffler, Philipp

Hardcover

Series: European Studies in North American Literature and Culture, Book 19

Literary CriticismFiction AnthologiesGeneral World History

ISBN10: 1571139524
ISBN13: 9781571139528
Publisher: Camden House Inc
Published: Dec 1 2015
Pages: 190
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Excavates the contemporary revival of 19th-century cultural pluralism, revealing how American novelists since the 1990s have appropriated the historical novel in the pursuit of selfhood rather than truth, fundamentally repositioning the genre in American culture.

In Pluralist Desires, Philipp Löffler explores the contemporary historical novel in conjunction with three cultural shifts that have crucially affected political and intellectual life in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s: the end of the Cold War, the decline of postmodernism, and the re-emergence of cultural pluralism. Contemporary historical fiction -- from Don DeLillo's Underworld and Philip Roth's American trilogy to Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark and Toni Morrison's A Mercy -- relates and authorizes these developments by imagining the writing of history as a powerful form of world-making. Rather than asking whether history can ever be true, contemporary historical fiction investigates the uses of history for our individual lives. How can we use history to make our individual lives meaningful and worthy in the face of an unknown future?

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