Character and Satire in Post War Fiction

Ian Gregson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781847062659
• eBook ISBN: 9781441130006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This monograph analyses the use of caricature as one of the key strategies in narrative fiction since the war. Close analysis of some of the best known postwar novelists including Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter and Will Self, reveals how they use caricature to express postmodern conceptions of the self. In the process of moving away from the modernist focus on subjectivity, postmodern characterisation has often drawn on a much older satirical tradition which includes Hogarth and Gillray in the visual arts, and Dryden, Pope, Swift and Dickens in literature. Its key images depict the human as reduced to the status of an object, an animal or a machine, or the human body as dismembered to represent the fragmentation of the human spirit. Gregson argues that this return to caricature is symptomatic of a satirical attitude to the self which is particularly characteristic of contemporary culture.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Subverting Racist Caricature: Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison
• 2 Joseph Heller’s Allegories of Money
• 3 Philip Roth’s Vulgar, Aggressive Clowning
• 4 Joyce Carol Oates’s Political Anger
• 5 Muriel Spark’s Puppets of Thwarted Authority
• 6 Magic Realism As Caricature: Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie
• 7 The Caricaturist As Celebrity: Martin Amis and Will Self
• 8 Caricature Versus Character: The Self As Cartoon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index