BUCH
The Traumatic Celebration of Beauty in Alan Hollinghurst’s Fiction
Anglistische Forschungen, Bd. 474
2022
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Abstract
‘The Traumatic Celebration of Beauty in Alan Hollinghurst’s Fiction’ is the first monograph to delve into all the novels published by the writer so far: from his extraordinary debut, ‘The Swimming-Pool Library’ (1988), to ‘The Sparsholt’s Affair’ (2017). The chapters follow a chronological order in Hollinghurst’s production. However, all of them address the complex interaction of traumatic and celebratory discourses as voiced by gay and queer characters ranging from the twentieth to the early twenty-first century. This timely volume is intended to explore the limits of same-sex desire and identity in Hollinghurst’s six novels drawing on trauma theory and intertextuality.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
| Zwischenüberschrift | Seite | Aktion | Preis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cover | Cover | ||
| Titel | 3 | ||
| Imprint | 4 | ||
| Contents | 5 | ||
| Introduction: On juxtaposition, Narcissus and Echo | 7 | ||
| 1 The ‚Swimming-pool Library‘: The specular structure of (un)saying | 23 | ||
| 1.1 Critical reception and controversy | 23 | ||
| 1.2 The triangular speculum | 31 | ||
| 1.3 Artefacts of triangulation | 39 | ||
| 1.4 Some sort of a gay sensibility | 42 | ||
| 1.5 First-level reflection. The postmodernist text reflects the homosexual canon | 51 | ||
| 1.6 Second level reflection. The postmodernist novel reflects itself | 60 | ||
| 2 The specular tryptich: Delusory Narcissus in ‚The Folding Star‘ | 69 | ||
| 2.1 ‚The Folding Star‘, a thwarted sequel of ‚The Swimming-pool Library‘? | 73 | ||
| 2.2 The structure of ‚The Folding Star‘ | 77 | ||
| 2.3 Specular homosocial triangles | 79 | ||
| 2.4 Key-hole narration, the shadow of Proust | 84 | ||
| 2.5 Recasting the aesthetics of obsessive desire through irony | 86 | ||
| 2.6 Arcadia gained, threatened and lost | 93 | ||
| 3 Orton meets Shakespeare in a Midsummer night’s gay comedy: ‚The Spell‘ | 101 | ||
| 3.1 The novel’s structuring of identity | 105 | ||
| 3.2 Architecture, nature and the symbolism of lines | 107 | ||
| 3.3 Focalisation, or the ethics of the lines of attention | 110 | ||
| 3.4 ‚The Spell‘ as an intertextual novel | 113 | ||
| 4 The trauma of beauty: The Dionysian assault on the AIDS crisis | 127 | ||
| 4.1 Reception and preliminary considerations | 127 | ||
| 4.2 Back to the Traumatic Eighties | 130 | ||
| 4.3 The specular structure of ‚The Line of Beauty‘: Hogarth’s ‚Analysis of Beauty‘ revised | 132 | ||
| 4.4 Intertextuality and anti-Thatcherism | 137 | ||
| 4.5 Aestheticism, the trauma of AIDS and Apollonian tragedy | 144 | ||
| 5 Inter/trans-generational blind corners of memory as myth of origins | 155 | ||
| 5.1 ‚The Stranger’s Child‘, the celebration and trauma of absence | 155 | ||
| 5.2 ‚The Sparsholt Affair‘: Ambiguous beauty through the trans-generational keyhole | 170 | ||
| Some concluding remarks | 185 | ||
| References | 191 | ||
| Backcover | Backcover |
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