Out of This World, Graham Swift’s fourth novel, was published in 1988. As in almost all of his fiction, Swift focuses on the troubled relations between parents and children caught in the aftermath of past choices. Set in April 1982, at the beginning of the ten-week conflict between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, the novel uses a historically resonant fictional present to render all major military campaigns of the twentieth century symbolic of meaningless sacrifice and unquenchable blood-thirst. ‘Arms and the man’ is a theme revisited in Out of This World but, in typical Swiftian mode, contemporary notions of heroism and love are exposed as media ploys typical of an era when &…
5213 words
Citation: Logotheti, Anastasia. "Out of This World". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 August 2004; last revised 07 February 2019. [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2957, accessed 25 November 2024.]
