Socially, politically, and artistically, the 1950s make up an odd
interlude between the first half of the twentieth century-still
tied to the problems and orders of the Victorian era and Gilded
Age-and the pervasive transformations of the later sixties. In
Revolution, Matthew Wilkens argues that postwar fiction functions
as a fascinating model of revolutionary change. Uniting literary
criticism, cultural analysis, political theory, and science
studies, Revolution reimagines the years after World War II as at
once distinct from the decades surrounding them and part of a
larger-scale series of rare, revolutionary moments stretching
across centuries. Focusing on the odd mix of allegory,
encyclopedism, and failure that characterizes fifties fiction,
Wilkens examines a range of literature written during similar times
of crisis, in the process engaging theoretical perspectives from
Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson to Bruno Latour and Alain
Badiou alongside readings of major novels by Ralph Ellison, William
Gaddis, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, and others.
Revolution links the forces that shaped postwar fiction to the
dynamics of revolutionary events in other eras and social domains.
Like physicists at the turn of the twentieth century or the French
peasantry of 1789, midcentury writers confronted a world that did
not fit their existing models. Pressed to adapt but lacking any
obvious alternative, their work became sprawling and figurative,
accumulating unrelated details and reusing older forms to ambiguous
new ends. While the imperatives of the postmodern eventually gave
order to this chaos, Wilkens explains that the same forces are
again at work in today's fracturing literary market.
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