1st Edition
The Crisis of Liberal Democracy in Contemporary Novels or The Continuation of History
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Sense of an Ending
1. Liberal Democracy and the Modern Novel
2. Liberal Democracy and Its Discontents: Karl Ove Knausgård’s Struggle at the End of History
3. The End and Continuation of History: Zadie Smith’s Critique of Francis Fukuyama in White Teeth
4. The Reactionary Dystopia: Boualem Sansal’s 2084 vis-à-vis George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
5. The Decline and Fall of Liberal Democracy: Michel Houellebecq’s Submission as Satire
Conclusion: Imaginary Futures and Political Realities
Index
Biography
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.
"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
