Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945

Abstract

What constitutes a political novel? In this sharply argued book Robert Boyers Demonstrates that the genre is very much alive and cites as evidence the works of writers such as Gunter Grass, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Milan Kundera. Boyers sees a political novel as an instrument for understanding the central experiences of our day-at its best an act of resistance to the comfortable association of actual conditions. He contends that they achieve their ends not with a soul-searching call to action but by quietly generating respect for the imagination that can never be content with things as they are. Working deliberately against the grain of the assumptions dominant in today's literary academy, Boyers treats the novels of Grass, Solzhenitsyn, Greene, Kundera, and others as criticisms of life rather then self-referring artifacts. In Atrocity and Amnesia, Boyers makes an important contribution to contemporary political thought.

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