We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
The Inheritance of Loss -- Memory, Absence and Acceptance in Recent Booker Prize Winning Novels.
- Authors
Földváry, Kinga
- Abstract
The essay examines six recent winners of the Man Booker Prize, published between 2005 and 2011, with an intention to show how the most mainstream genre of literature, the novel, is characterised by a powerful desire to preserve the past through memory, a reflection on what we have inherited from our pasts, both in a personal sense, and in the wider context of humanity as a whole. When examining what exactly it is that narratives attempt to remember, we may find only a theme definable by negation: it is a general sense of loss, accompanied by an absence of meaning, together with the inability to communicate that appears to characterise contemporary English prose fiction. The essay also justifies the selection of the Booker winners as signifiers of contemporary tendencies in literary representation by arguing that it is precisely the lack of spectacular literary or stylistic innovations that make the Man Booker Prize representative of average, mainstream, middlebrow fiction today.
- Subjects
MAN Booker Prize; LITERARY prizes; LITERARY criticism; FICTION; ENGLISH prose literature; LITERARY style
- Publication
Human: Journal of Literature & Culture, 2013, Issue 1, p21
- ISSN
2147-9739
- Publication type
Essay