Overview

This book explores how contemporary novels reflect a profound shift in Western culture, from the political optimism of the post-Cold War era to growing fears about the future of liberal democracy. Analysing four major works – Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle series, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Boualem Sansal's 2084 and Michel Houellebecq's Submission – it shows how these novels illuminate current social discontents and engages the anxieties of our time. Where the so-called ""end-of-history"" narrative once promised a triumphant liberal democracy, novelistic fiction today reflects a more ominous outlook: progressives are haunted by dystopian visions of democratic decline, while reactionaries fear cultural displacement and yearn for a lost Golden Age. Bridging literary analysis and political theory, the book offers new perspectives on how literature engages with and challenges contemporary political narratives, making it a vital resource for those interested in the intersection of politics and literature.

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9781032870441

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""The Crisis of Liberal Democracy in Contemporary Novels is a highly engaging and profoundly insightful study of the current atrophy of liberal democracy. Leander Møller Gøttcke’s original take on this issue is his focus on novelistic depictions of everyday life in democratic societies. In a tour de force of practical literary criticism, he shows how novelists from Zadie Smith to Michel Houellebecq are attuned to recent political transformations. What characterizes our time, he argues, is a deep historical pessimism and the erosion of a shared sense of peoplehood in the liberal democracies of the West."" - Professor Kirk Wetters, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University

Author Information

Leander Møller Gøttcke holds a PhD from the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. He currently works as a research librarian at the University Library of Southern Denmark.

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