The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue

Voorkant
Oxford University Press, 6 apr 2000 - 224 pagina's
Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit. Kermode then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. He goes on to deal perceptively with modern literature with "traditionalists" such as Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the difference between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth, or commenting on the vogue of the Absurd, Kermode is distinctly lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.
 

Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

The End
3
Fictions
35
World Without End or Beginning
67
The Modern Apocalypse
93
Literary Fiction and Reality
127
Solitary Confinement
155
The Sense of an Ending 1999
181
NOTES
199
Copyright

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Populaire passages

Pagina 7 - into the middest', in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems.

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Over de auteur (2000)

Frank Kermode was formerly King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Cambridge University.

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