The Sense of an Ending Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue

by Kermode, Frank

• ISBN13: 9780195136128
• ISBN10: 0195136128
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-06
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisitsthe book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how thesehave reflected the apocalyptic spirit. Kermode then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. He goes on to deal perceptively with modern literature with "traditionalists" suchas Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the difference between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth,or commenting on the vogue of the Absurd, Kermode is distinctly lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.

Author Biography

Frank Kermode was formerly King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Cambridge University.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
The End	3	(32)
Fictions	35	(32)
World Without End or Beginning	67	(26)
The Modern Apocalypse	93	(34)
Literary Fiction and Reality	127	(28)
Solitary Confinement	155	(26)
Epilogue The Sense of an Ending, 1999	181	(18)
Notes	199