Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium

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: Ian Ellison
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 04/04/2023
Pages: 274
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.83w x 0.62d
ISBN: 9783030954499

About the Author

Ian Ellison divides his time as a DAAD PRIME postdoctoral research fellow between the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, their Paris School of Arts & Culture, France, and the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. This is his first book.