Character and Satire in Post War Fiction

Download or read book Character and Satire in Post War Fiction written by Ian Gregson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known postwar novelists including Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter and Will Self, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.