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

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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…

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 19 March 2024.]

7156 A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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