Legendary Figures

by Koelb, Clayton

• ISBN13: 9780803227392
• ISBN10: 0803227396
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Legendary Figuresexamines revolutionary views of the past that have played a crucial role in European and American literature of the last 150 years. Clayton Koelb traces these new approaches to history through an impressive range of novels, from Flaubert'sSalammboto Christa Wolf'sCassandra. Koelb argues that this new "historical sense," which arose in the midnineteenth century, gained eloquent expression in Flaubert's writings. What is crucial about the new historical sense is that it views the past as essentially "alien" and "other." The connection between past and present may be powerful, but it is always indirect and difficult to negotiate. As a result, the past seems exotic and unattainable, the object of nostalgia and desire. Koelb distinguishes this sense of history, with its persistent discontinuities between past and present, from the more continuous and progressive views of history of novelists like Sir Walter Scott and such philosophers as Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs. In their writings, history "proceeds according to the laws of cause and effect, and each epoch can be understood as both the result of the previous one and the cause of the next." In contrast, the modernist writers that Koelb examinesFlaubert, Pater, Mann, Broch, Wilder, Yourcenar, and Wolfimagine a past that is "mythic" and "legendary" and thus a metaphor for everything distant, complicated, unattainable, and unknowable.

Author Biography

Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Inventions of Reading: Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination and other books.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix	(2)
Introduction: The Sense of History	xi
1. The Legendary Past: Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo	1	(28)
2. The Legendary Present: Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean	29	(18)
3. The Garment of the Mystery: Thomas Mann's Joseph Tetralogy	47	(20)
4. The Legendary Self: Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil	67	(22)
5. De Morte Caesarum: Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March	89	(18)
6. The Alien Within: Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian	107	(20)
7. The Future of Antiquity: Christa Wolf's Cassandra	127	(16)
Conclusion: The Legendary Angel	143	(10)
Notes	153	(28)
Index	181