Customer Reviews

Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

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This book won the 2002 Barbara and George Perkins Award from the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. You can read a review online at EBR: Electronic Book Review.

This book is a major contribution to postmodernist theory and a much-needed response to cliché-ridden

dismissals of postmodernists' alleged disinterest in and "flight" from history. Elias shows mastery of the works of the principal representatives of postmodernist writing, the philosophical treatment of poststructuralism, and the serious literary criticism of modernism. She amply demonstrates that, far from being a "flight" from history, most postmodernist novels are in fact historical novels, though of a kind quite different from their nineteenth-century prototypes. Dogmatists, of course, will not be moved, but anyone with an open mind can gain a new and original perspective on the relation between history and literature, fact and fiction, perception and writing, and the conflict between literary realism, on the one hand, and its modernist counterpart, on the other.

Hayden White

Elias offers a lucid account of postmodernism's relationship to history. Sublime Desire is something of a rare bird, in that it is theoretically rigorous without neglecting fiction, or merely paying it lip-service. Novelists such as Pynchon, Barth, Silko, and Scott are not just trotted out to fill out chapters; rather, one gets the sense that Elias actually developed her theoretical approach out of a close reading of the texts she discusses.

Some familiarity with the fist half of Foucault's 'Archaeology of Knowledge' and Jameson's 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' will be helpful.

One point: the publisher's list price of $47.00 is absurd.