The writing of war : French and German fiction and World War II
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The writing of war : French and German fiction and World War II
(Crosscurrents)
University Press of Florida, c1999
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [177]-185) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In revaluating how World War II affected the writing of literature in France and Germany, the author argues that many established writers (Thomas Mann, Ernst Junger, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre) were unsuccessful in their attempts to write about the war precisely because they refused to confront the ways in which the conflict was so radically different from previous wars. In particular, atrocities such as the Nazi's Final Solution, the atomic devastation of Japan, and the bombings of civilian populations called into question the moral and intellectual framework that had shaped Western thinking. Combining a literary history and textual analyses, Cloonan turns to efforts in France and Germany by younger artists to rethink the approach to literature in a postwar context, devoting attention to Group 47 (Germany) and the New Novelists (France). At the centre of his study are detailed analyses of novels by Celine, Gunter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Claude Simon and Christa Wolf. Cloonan explains how each writer opened new perspectives on World War II and in so doing contributed to the establishment of a postwar literary consciousness. Cloonan argues, in conclusion, that the novel remains a valuable tool for exploring social reality precisely because it remains capable of addressing an audience that extends beyond the academic community.
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