Violence Without God - The Rhetorical Despair of Twentieth-Century Writers (Hardcover)

As twentieth-century writers confronted the political violence of their time, they were overcome by rhetorical despair. Unspeakable acts left writers speechless. They knew that the atrocities of the century had to be recorded, but how? A dead body does not explain itself, and the narrative of the suicide bomber is not the story of the child killed in the blast. In the past, communal beliefs had justified or condemned the most horrific acts, but the late nineteenth-century crisis of belief made it more difficult to come to terms with the meaning of violence. In this major new study, Joyce Wexler argues that this situation produced an aesthetic dilemma that writers solved by inventing new forms. Although Symbolism, Expressionism, Modernism, Magic Realism, and Postmodernism have been criticized for turning away from public events, these forms allowed writers to represent violence without imposing a specific meaning on events or claiming to explain them. Wexler's investigation of the way we think and write about violence takes her across national and period boundaries and into the work of some of the greatest writers of the century, among them Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Alfred Doeblin, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, and W. G. Sebald.

General

Imprint:	Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	December 2016
Authors:	Joyce Wexler
Dimensions:	216 x 140 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	216
ISBN-13:	978-1-5013-2529-8
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900 Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Violence in society > General
LSN:	1-5013-2529-9
Barcode:	9781501325298

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