Abstract

In The Life of the Party, Christopher Ames contends that "festive vision," which he defines as "life conceived in terms of celebration" (2), offers an "angle of fictional approach" by which to view the progression from modernist to postmodernist practices of twentieth-century British and American novelists. Ames's specific subjects are Joyce and Woolf; Fitzgerald, Waugh and Henry Green (his "Party Between the Wars" figures, whom he regards as "caught between two novelistic traditions–the realistic and the carnivalistic" [30]); and Pynchon and Coover. The study concentrates on showing that tensions between thematic searches for self-authentication and fragmentation in a modern, secular world, often revealed in party scenes, drive developments in fictive–particularly narrative–technique and experiment.

How to Cite:

Sullivan, R., (1992) “Celebrate, Celebrate”, Pynchon Notes , 194-197. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.245