The Post-war Novel and the Death of the Author

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. The Rise of Theory and the Death of the Author

   • Arya Aryan

   Pages 1-45

3. Women Writers, from Madness to Agency

   • Arya Aryan

   Pages 47-116

4. Postmodernist Fiction, Madness and Agency

   • Arya Aryan

   Pages 117-174

5. The Author in the Age of Risk Society

   • Arya Aryan

   Pages 175-228

6. Conclusion

   • Arya Aryan

   Pages 229-232

7. Back Matter

   Pages 233-240

   PDF

This book not only discloses and examines different functions and concepts of authorship in fiction and theory from the 1950s and 1960s to the present but it also reveals, at least implicitly, a trajectory of some of the modes and functions of the novel as a genre in the last few decades. It argues that the explicit terms of much of the theoretical and philosophical debate surrounding the concept of authorship in the moment of High Theory in the 1980s had already been engaged, albeit often more implicitly, in literary fictions by writers themselves. This book examines the fortunes of the authorship debate and the conceptualisations and functions of authorship before, during, and after the Death of the Author came to prominence as one of the key foci for the moment of High Theory in the 1980s.

• Death of the Author
• Authorship
• Madness
• Agency
• Postmodernism
• Metamodernism
• postmodern literature

“The Post-war Novel and the Death of the Author offers a wide-ranging and innovative account of the theory and practice of authorship in the second half of the twentieth century. Arya Aryan’s illuminating study presents a three-pronged approach to authorship: an account of the emergence of the ‘death of the author’ debates in French theory in the 1960s; the influence of novels of the 1950s and 1960s by writers such as Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov on those debates; and a consideration of the way that, in the wake of high theory and high postmodernism, novels by Rushdie, Coetzee, and Mantel re-work an ethics of authorship in a globalised context.” (Andrew Bennett, Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK)

• Institute of English Language and Literatures, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

  Arya Aryan

Arya Aryan holds a PhD in Postmodernist, Feminist and Contemporary Literature From Durham University, UK, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany. He has published a few articles on contemporary literature with Alluvium Journal and is a reviewer of the Durham English Review. Previously, he was a teaching assistant in the Department of English Studies, Durham University, UK. He was also a co-editor of Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English.

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