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Amy J. Elias.Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.xxvii + 320 pp.
Amy Elias's Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction proves to be a solid contribution to contemporary scholarly investigations of the rich intersections between late-twentieth-century reconceptualizations of history and the fiction of the time. Elias's study participates in this larger project by more specifically examining a genre of post-1960s fiction that she terms "Metahistorical Romance" and that she positions simultaneously as (altered) heir to the classic historical romances of Walter Scott and as a response and contribution to the antifoundationalist impulses of contemporary historiography. While metahistorical romances acknowledge the impossibility of accessing history, according to Elias, they nevertheless express a "desire for History" (xviii). These texts redefine history as "sublime"-as that which is desired but remains "unknowable and unrepresentable in discourse," as "the space of the chaotic, and hence to rational beings, the terrifying, past" and, yet, as necessarily still linked to the political in that it is "also the realm of potential revelation" (42, 55). Moreover, Elias insists that these novels' desire for a historical sublime remains balanced by...