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California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels - Exiled from Eden (Paperback)
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California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels - Exiled from Eden (Paperback)
Series: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's
Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian
identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood
as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the
tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word.
The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is
portrayed in Joan Didion's novels, starting with the first two in
which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As
It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last
Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point
of reference, receding to the background of Didion's interests.
Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history
of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of
the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among
other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the
monograph sees as the main problem of Didion's fiction and presents
it as the silent center of gravity in Didion's oeuvre. The
monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion's
fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and
Language; around which the main analytical chapters are
constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to
haunt Didion's fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal
of California and its identity - which is the central theme this
monograph addresses.
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