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

Save to Bookshelf

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…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

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 24 November 2024.]

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

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback