The Historical Novel of Contemporary Capitalism
In a 2011 survey piece published in the London Review of Books – a genre in which he has lately come to specialise – Perry Anderson charts a history of the historical novel as that form of the novel which has, he writes, « almost by definition, been the most consistently political ». Essentially an extension of, and occasional critical engagement with, the work of both Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson, the article tracks – as its title, « From Progress to Catastrophe », suggests – the genre’s development from early nineteenth-century narratives of bourgeois triumphalism, and the emergence of modern nationhood, to « the ravages of empire », and of « impending or consummated catastrophe », in the second half of the twentieth century.
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