"In Sublime Desire, Amy J. Elias examines our changing relationship to history and how fiction written since 1960 reflects that change. She contends that postmodernism is a post-traumatic imagination that is pulled between two desires: the political desire to acknowledge the physical violence of twentieth-century history and the yearning for an escape from that history into a ravishing realm of historical certainty.

Torn between these desires, both historical fiction and historiography after 1960 redefine history as the "sublime," a territory beyond lived experience that is both unknowable and seductive. In the face of a failure of Enlightenment ideals about knowledge and the West's own history of violence, post-World War II history becomes a desire for the "secular sacred" sublime - for awe, certainty, and belief."--BOOK JACKET.