Figures of Catastrophe - The Condition of Culture Novel

A Bold New Vision Of The Modern English Novel The Leading Critic Francis Mulhern Uncovers A Hidden History In The Fiction Of The Past Century, Identifying A Central New Genre: The Condition Of Culture Novel. Reading Across And Against The Grain Of Received Patterns Of Literary Association, Tracing A Line From Hardy And Forster, Through Woolf, Waugh And Bowen, To Barstow, Fowles, Rendell, Naipaul, Amis, Kureishi And Smith, He Elucidates The Recurring Topics And Narrative Logics Of The Genre, Showing How Culture Emerges As A Special Ground Of Social Conflict, Above All Between Classes. The Narrative Evaluations Of Culture's Ends--the Aspirations And The Destinies Of Those Whose Lives Are The Subject Of These Novels--grow Steadily Darker Over Time, And The Writing Itself Grows More Introverted. A Concluding Discussion Elicits The Characteristics Of The English Condition Of Culture Novel, In An International Setting, And Closes In, Finally, On The Central Conundrum Of The Genre: Its Uncanny Reprise, In Its Own Plane, Of The Historical Arc Of The Modern Labour Movement In Britain, From Its Beginnings In The Late Nineteenth Century Through Its Post-war Heyday To The Seemingly Inexorable Decline Of Recent Decades. "The leading critic Francis Mulhern uncovers a hidden history in the English novel and demonstrates its intimate, formative association with the course of the British labor movement, from its rise in the early twentieth century to the years of decline from the 1980s onwards. In this striking reconstruction, culture emerges as a stake in social conflict, above all that of classes; the narrative evaluations of culture's ends--the aspirations and destinies of those whose lives are the matter of its fictions--grow steadily darker as time passes. Readings of classic and contemporary novelists from Hardy and Forster to Amis, Kureishi and Smith, among others, illuminate the forms and narrative logics of the genre that Mulhern terms the "condition of culture novel," and places it in international context"-- Provided by publisher