The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation

Inflation affects literary occupations and preoccupations quite as much as it does financial scrip. Starting from this premise, Charles Newman ventures forth on an irreverent, wide-ranging discussion of thePost-Modern attitude infiction, culture, and sensibility. Newman questions the revolutionary claims of avant-garde novelists and literary theorists, but he no less critical of the argumentsof neoconservatives, neorealists, and advocates of moralfiction. Newman argues that neither of these groups has confronted the unprecedented break with tradition entailed by an economics and culture of inflation. A combination ofcultural critique, literary criticism, economic forecast, and historical jeremiad, The Post-Modern Aura is finally a positive statement, celebrating The Act of Fiction and suggesting how the forces which have been devaluing it might be overcome.