Can There Be Multiple Keys? The Age of Longing and the Genre of the Roman-à-clef

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F46747885%3A24510%2F21%3A00008961" target="_blank" >RIV/46747885:24510/21:00008961 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Can There Be Multiple Keys? The Age of Longing and the Genre of the Roman-à-clef

Original language description

The Age of Longing (1951), possibly along with The Call-Girls (1972), is easily Arthur Koestler‘s least often discussed novel. As far as sources in English are concerned, since Mark Levene’s Arthur Koestler (1984), no monograph or collected volume of essays has dealt with this book, and none of the literary histories discussing Koestler‘s fiction mention the novel either (i.e. Twentieth-Century English Literature (1986) by Harry Blamires, Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel (2001), and The Short Oxford History of English Literature (2004) by Andrew Sanders). The only article published in an academic journal which discusses the novel in detail is James Duban‘s „Philip Roth, Arthur Koestler, and the Varieties of Indignation” (2018), which interprets it as a source of Philip Roth‘s metaphors. The novel does feature, however, in Koestler‘s recent deluge of biographies (Cesarani 1998, Scammell 2009, Saunders 2017). Those texts, however, springing most probably from their genre and their authors‘ focus on the author rather than the text, do not go further than discussing the conditions of its creation and repeating the assessments of a selection of reviews from 1951. What they seem to agree on, however, in fact seconding Mark Levene (1984), is that the novel is a thinly disguised roman-a-clef, aiming at criticizing the French intelligentsia of the left from the perspective of a, by then, right-wing intellectual. This chapter examines the novel‘s categorization as a roman-a-clef and argues for a reconsideration of this claim. It shows that while statements about the fictional characters! real-world identity are almost always presented as obvious, self-evident and ridiculously transparent, those very claims often disagree about those very identities. Further, it compares the novel to its little-known Ur-text, Koestler‘s short story, „Les temps héroïques,” published in 1948 in French in a minor journal, analyzing the changes to the characters, arguing for the new text‘s move from the personal to the general. Drawing on Sean Latham‘s (2009) arguments, it also calls for a less judgmental and more productive understanding of the genre itself. And finally, noting The Age of Longing‘s (1951) simultaneous employment of elements of the philosophical novel and the political novel, it calls attention to the book‘s complexity and enduring interest.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60204 - General literature studies

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Arthur Koestler‘s Fiction and the Genre of the Novel: Rubashov and Beyond

ISBN

978-1-79362-225-9

Number of pages of the result

25

Pages from-to

33-57

Number of pages of the book

302

Publisher name

Lexington Books

Place of publication

Lanham, MD

UT code for WoS chapter

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