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E-book
Author James, David, 1979- author.

Title Discrepant solace : contemporary literature and the work of consolation / David James
Edition First edition
Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019
©2019

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Description 1 online resource
Summary Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and memoir. Making close readings of emotion crucial to understanding literature's work in the precarious present, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J.M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation's kinship with ideological complaisance or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed May 13, 2019)
Subject English fiction -- 21st century -- History and criticism
Consolation in literature.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
Consolation in literature
English fiction
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
Author James, David, 1979- editor.
ISBN 9780192506931
0192506935