Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

Vanessa Guignery (École normale supérieure de Lyon)

Ed. by Cristina Sandru, The Literary Encyclopedia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1989

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Metafiction
Novel

Resources

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Published in 1989,

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

is Julian Barnes’s fifth novel and, together with

Flaubert’s Parrot

, it is his most experimental work and the one which has attracted the most attention from critics and readers. Both novels are marked by formal ingenuity and display postmodernist features such as generic hybridity, a blurring of the borders between fiction and historiography, epistemological questionings as to what can be known about the past as well as narrative and structural fragmentation. Right from its title,

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

destabilizes generic conventions by pointing in the direction of both history and fiction, while the indefinite article and the fraction seem to suggest that a comprehensive, objective and coherent knowledge…

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3011 words

Citation: Guignery, Vanessa. "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 April 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7156, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

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