This book is the first comparative study of novels by Patrick Modiano, W. G. Sebald, and Antonio Muñoz Molina. Drawing on many literary figures, movements, and traditions, from the Spanish Golden Age, to German Romanticism, to French philosophy, via Jewish modernist literature, Ian Ellison offers a fresh perspective on European fiction published around the turn of the millennium. Reflecting on what makes European fiction European, this book examines how certain novels understand themselves to be culturally and historically late, expressing a melancholy awareness of how the past and present are irreconcilable. Within this framework, however, it considers how backwards-facing, tradition-oriented self-consciousness, burdened by a sense of exhaustion in European culture and the violence of its past, may yet suggest the potential for re-enchantment in the face of obsolescence.
Author(s): Ian Ellison
Series: Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 283
City: London
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
Chapter 1: The Late, the Melancholy, and the European
Literary Lateness in Europe
From Literary Lateness to the Melancholy of History
European Fiction
Chapter 2: Detecting Lateness in Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano
Memories and Tensions
Lineage and Palimpsest
Bricolage and Brocanterie
Light and Shadow
Absence and Emptiness
A Dark Prison
Chapter 3: Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald: A Late Fairy Tale
Granular Novelties
Modern and Romantic Lateness
Artists and Ruins
Fortresses and False Worlds
Underworlds and Thresholds
Bearable Survival
Chapter 4: Exiled Lateness in Sefarad by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Endings and Epigraphs
Artefacts of Lateness
Lateness and Liminality
The Fantasy of Nostalgia
Homelands and Erasure
Difference and Compromise
Chapter 5: The Event Horizon of European Fiction
Whither ‘European’ Fiction?
Consolation and Defiance
Event Horizon
Bibliography
Primary
Secondary
Websites
Index
