Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction
by Amy J. Elias
Sublime Desire explores the intersections between postmodern cultural theory, historiography, post-1960s fiction, and the historical novel literary genre. Examining more than thirty novels from 1960 to the present, the book explores how the postmodern in fiction and history represents itself as a post-traumatic First World imagination pulled between two desires: the desire to acknowledge the ideological violence of its own history and the desire to escape from that history into certainty and redemption. The resulting circularity of reasoning leads to a new form of historical fiction after WWII, the metahistorical romance. It also leads post-modern fiction and historiography to a "metahistorical" perspective that seeks after the historical sublime and contrasts to both modernist avant-garde and postcolonial writing.