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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,471
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Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality (Hardcover, New)
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Pat Barker is one of the most compelling of the current generation
of British novelists, especially in her use of the novel as an
instrument of social critique, fashioning a literature which does
not shy away from asking thorny questions, refusing the doctrinaire
of what goes without saying, suspicious of simple answers. To date
she has published eleven novels, some of which have been adapted
for stage and screen. In this critical study, David Waterman
examines questions of social representation in all of Pat Barker's
novels, published over the last twenty-five years, from Union
Street (1982) to the recent Life Class (2007), especially the ways
in which Barker encourages us to interrogate the reality created by
such conventionalizing, prescriptive representations in favor of a
reality more accurately represented through a critical assessment
of the uses and abuses of collective representations. Barker's
principal characters are out of step with the natural order of
things; they question cultural constructions like masculinity,
heroism, the unquestionable right of institutions, and they worry
about their role as members of the larger community. Such questions
are often, fundamentally, questions of representation, whether we
examine how existing representations serve to maintain the status
quo, or whether we are interested in how to represent the horrors
of war or the atrocities of civil life, how to give voice to trauma
in an effort to approach something resembling truth--in other
words, how best to represent the kinds of human experiences which
resist representation. Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social
Reality is an important book for scholars interested in
contemporary British fiction, women's writing, and
social-psychological approaches to literature. "A valuable addition
to Barker scholarship in that it gives us ways to read the deep
influence of social structures and how, through language and other
means, they work themselves into individuals social and sexual
identities ... it comprehensively covers Barker's eleven novels,
and how the contrast between social inscription and traumatic
experience is a repeated theme revisited in different contexts in
each text ... the author highlights the value of Barker's work as
social commentary and makes readers aware of her artistry in
creating the rich inner lives of her complex characters and their
multiple discourses that offer up ways to rethink enormous social
and personal issues with a compelling clarity about the need for
re-visioning our world." - Prof. Laurie Vickroy, Bradley University
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