The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction [Paperback]

A wide-ranging study that examines the tendency in 20th-century English fiction to treat grief as an occasion for social critique, unconventional readings of works by Ford, Lessing, and Winterson demonstrate how narrative experimentation in this period responds to socio-historic conditions like post-imperial melancholy, nuclear fear and homophobia.Acknowledgements Introduction: Literature Beyond Consolation? Melancholia, Group Psychology, Irony: Psychoanalytic Foundations The End of Empire: Grieving, Englishness, and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier Mourning the Future: The Nuclear Threat, Prophecy, and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook Embodied Grief: Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body and the Elegiac Tradition Conclusion: A Literature of Hope: Ethics and Mourning Notes Bibliography IndexSARAH HENSTRA is Assistant Professor of English at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. She has previously published in such journals as Papers in Language and Literature, Studies in the Novel, Textual Practice, and Twentieth Century Literature.