Medieval romance after HIV and AIDS: Aesthetics of innocence and naivete and the postmodern novel

This dissertation explores fiction by Patrick McCabe, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Samuel R. Delany. Under the guise of the fantastic and the grotesque, these novelists abandoned the modern and postmodern aesthetics of nihilism, pastiche, and irony in favor of a return to affect, sincerity, and authenticity. This undermining of the prevailing postmodernist aesthetic and the reassertion of the power of the artist to heal is tied to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For the majority of the 1980s and 1990s, public depictions of people with HIV/AIDS overwhelmingly prevented the representation of the act of mourning and were instead devoted to the horror of dying. The cold abstraction of the gay male body during the initial AIDS crisis was an instantiation of Fredric Jameson's idea that the "waning of affect" characterizes postmodern culture. However, seeking a means to combat the failure of sentiment and empathy for those with HIV/AIDS, these novelists inspired a return to a love of affect, allowing literature to become again a place for the sincere representation of the beauty of memory and consciousness.;With the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, artists and subcultural movements concerned with fantastic representations of the body and sexual identity often turned to the pre-modern aesthetics of the medieval romance. Writers of medieval romances believed in the power of the artist to disrupt and reorder the reader's perception of the world by reaching beyond the text and offering an alternate reality in which to define the tragedies of one's body and sexual identity.;The fictional expressions of mourning I examine encourage and contribute to a rise of affect. Melancholia---the permanent state of grief which Sigmund Freud diagnosed in 1917 as a harmful condition---is re-envisioned as a political form of affection on behalf of the dying and the dead. A love of memory, I find, is what defines the novel as a form, and thus such a shared love often makes any distinctions between modernism and postmodernism---and even the romance of the medieval---illusory.