Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism

Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism illuminates the emergence of a fundamentally new way of thinking and writing about loss in the twentieth-century novel, one that spurns consolation and the conventional aim of closure. Inaugurated in the modernist novel, the rejection of consolation manages to promote a politically progressive politics of mourning. The modernist novel established as well the terms of a new mourning practice, terms whose democratizing aims would be challenged in the late-modernist period but ultimately reanimated and reworked by postmodern writers. In challenging the familiar view of modernist aesthetics as removed from social concerns and of postmodernist aesthetics as a self-reflexive language game incapable of representing affirmative content, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism demonstrates how novelists of some of the most experimental fiction of the century engage the open-ended aspects of loss to imagine new forms of identity and social change.