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Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

2017-09-20
Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

Author: Andy Connolly

Publisher: Lexington Books

ISBN: 9781498511810

Category: Political Science

Page: 293

View: 261

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Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a fresh reading of the later career development of one of America’s most celebrated authors. Through a contextual analysis of a select number of texts, this innovative study discusses how famed novels such as American Pastoral and The Plot against America demonstrate Philip Roth’s considerable interest in mapping, by means of his unique literary talent, the changing shape and fortunes of American liberalism since the 1930s. By viewing these novels and other seminal works of his later period through a wider historical lens, this book informs readers of the myriad ways in which Roth’s major phase of writing since the mid-1990s has shown considerable concern with questions of class, ethnicity, race, gender, and literary culture, all of which have been key components in the shifting intellectual and political makeup of American liberal ideology from the New Deal to our present time. This book goes beyond a mere historical analysis by taking a new look at how Roth’s experimentations in narrative style and his appeal to ahistorical notions of literary tradition rest in complex alignment with his fictional treatment of aspects of American history. This novel work of criticism demonstrates a heightened awareness of Roth’s career-length fascination with the formal characteristics of fiction, making clear to its audience that any reductively linear reading of Roth as a political novelist should be avoided at all costs. Ultimately, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a stimulatingly intelligent approach to the art of one of America’s true literary titans, providing the focused reader with a nuanced understanding of how Roth’s fiction has been shaped by the various competing strains in his dual roles as a disinterested formalist aesthete, on the one hand, and as a politically engaged author on the other.

Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

2019-08
Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

Author: Andy Connolly

Publisher: Lexington Books

ISBN: 1498511821

Category:

Page: 292

View: 190

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This book offers a combined historical and aesthetic analysis of five novels from Philip Roth's later career. It reads these works in the context of political, cultural, and literary developments in America from the New Deal to the present.

Philip Roth

2021
Philip Roth

Author: Ira Nadel

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

ISBN: 9780199846108

Category: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Page: 577

View: 177

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This new biography of the controversial, influential, and prize-winning American novelist Philip Roth, a writer with an international reputation for inventive, original novels from Portnoy's Complaint to American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, is based on new access to archival documents and new interviews with Roth's friends and associates.

Understanding Philip Roth

2022-04-14
Understanding Philip Roth

Author: Matthew A. Shipe

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

ISBN: 9781643363110

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 152

View: 878

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A panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated—and controversial—authors of the twentieth century Philip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018, he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In Understanding Philip Roth, Matthew A. Shipe provides a brief biographical sketch followed by an illuminating and accessible reading of Roth's novels, illustrating how the writer constructed one of the richest bodies of work in American letters, capturing the absurdities, contradictions, and turmoil that shaped the United States in the six decades following the Second World War. Questions of Jewish American identity, the irrationality of male sexual desire, the nature of the American experiment—these are a few of the central concerns that run throughout Roth's oeuvre, and across which his early and late novels speak to one another. Moreover, Shipe considers how Roth's fiction engaged with its historical moment, providing a broader context for understanding how his novels address the changes that transformed American culture during his lifetime.

Philip Roth in Context

2021-04-30
Philip Roth in Context

Author: Maggie McKinley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9781108809559

Category: Literary Criticism

Page:

View: 853

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Written by leading scholars on Philip Roth from around the globe, this book offers new insight into the various contexts that inform his body of work. It opens with an overview of Roth's life and literary influences, before turning to important critical, geographical, theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts. It closes with focused meditations on the various iterations of Roth's legacy, from the screen to international translations of his work to his signature stylistic imprint on American letters. Together, all of these chapters reveal Roth's range as a writer, as he interrogates American national identity and history, and explores the dimensions of the individual self.

The Philip Roth We Don't Know

2021-09-14
The Philip Roth We Don't Know

Author: Jacques Berlinerblau

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

ISBN: 9780813946627

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 240

View: 579

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"In The Philip Roth We Don't Know, Jacques Berlinerblau offers not only a profile of Philip Roth but also a guide on how and why we should keep reading him given our era's changed sensibilities in terms of race, gender, and sexuality"--

Roth's Wars

2022-07-12
Roth's Wars

Author: James D. Bloom

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

ISBN: 9781666913859

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 189

View: 751

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Roth’s Wars is an inquiry into how Roth cast himself throughout his fiction as a war writer, a teller of soldier stories, in relation to Roth’s and his narrators' subsidiary performances as sportswriters, crime reporters, polemicists, pundits, and movie fans.

The Moderate Imagination

2020-05-07
The Moderate Imagination

Author: Yoav Fromer

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

ISBN: 9780700629527

Category: Political Science

Page: 300

View: 298

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Americans finally faced a perplexing political reality: Democrats, purported champions of working people since the New Deal, had lost the white working-class voters of Middle America. For answers about how this could be, Yoav Fromer turns to an unlikely source: the fiction of John Updike. Though commonly viewed as an East Coast chronicler of suburban angst, the gifted writer (in fact a native of the quintessential Rust Belt state, Pennsylvania) was also an ardent man of ideas, political ideas—whose fiction, Fromer tells us, should be read not merely as a reflection of the postwar era but rather as a critical investigation into the liberal culture that helped define it. Several generations of Americans since the 1960s have increasingly felt “left behind.” In Updike’s early work, Fromer finds a fictional map of the failures of liberalism that might explain these grievances. The Moderate Imagination also taps previously unknown archival materials and unread works from his college years at Harvard to offer a clearer view of the author’s acute political thought and ideas. Updike’s prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them. In his writing, he traced liberalism’s historic decline to its own philosophical contradictions rather than to only commonly cited external circumstances like the Vietnam War, racial strife, economic recession, and conservative backlash. A subtle reinterpretation of John Updike’s legacy, Fromer’s work complicates and enriches our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s great American writers—even as the book deftly demonstrates what literature can teach us about politics and history.

Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives

2020-10-01
Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives

Author: Olaf Berwald

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

ISBN: 9781501351525

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 264

View: 537

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In his prose fiction, memoirs, poetry, and drama, Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989)--one of the 20th century's most uniquely gifted writers--created a new and radical style, seemingly out of thin air. His books never “tell a story” in the received sense. Instead, he rages on the page, he rants and spews vitriol about the moral failures of his homeland, Austria, in the long amnesiac aftermath of the Second World War. Yet this furious prose, seemingly shapeless but composed with unparalleled musicality, and taxing by conventional standards, has been powerfully echoed in many writers since Bernhard's death in 1989. These explorers have found in Bernhard's singular accomplishment new paths for the expression of life and truth. Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives examines the international mobilization of Bernhard's style. Writers in Italian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, English, and French have succeeded in making Bernhard's Austrian vision an international vision. This book tells that story.

Pop Goes the Decade: The Sixties

2020-01-31
Pop Goes the Decade: The Sixties

Author: Martin Kich

Publisher: ABC-CLIO

ISBN: 9781440862854

Category: Social Science

Page: 311

View: 986

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Analyzing complex social and political issues through their manifestations in popular culture, this book provides readers a strong foundational knowledge of the 1960s as a decade. 1969 went out in a way that could never have been imagined in 1960. While the president at the end of the decade had been vice president at the start, the intervening years permanently changed American culture. Pop Goes the Decade: The Sixties explores the cultural and social framework of the 1960s, addressing film, television, sports, technology, media/advertising, fashion, art, and more. Entries are presented in encyclopedic fashion, organized into categories such as controversies in pop culture, game changers, technology, and the decade's legacy. A timeline highlights significant cultural moments, while an introduction and a conclusion place those moments within the contexts of preceding and subsequent decades. Attention to the decade's most prominent influencers allows readers to understand the movements with which these figures are associated, and discussion of controversies and social change enables readers to gain a stronger understanding of evolving American social values. Provides readers with a detailed understanding of many aspects of the culture of the decade Explores people, events, and ideas whose impact is still felt after 50 years Covers personalities who helped to shape the decade Suggests areas of further exploration for students interested in popular culture

Making Liberalism New

2021-11-02
Making Liberalism New

Author: Ian Afflerbach

Publisher: JHU Press

ISBN: 9781421440927

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 288

View: 961

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A revisionist history of American liberalism, from the Great Depression to the Cold War. In Making Liberalism New, Ian Afflerbach traces the rise, revision, and fall of a modern liberalism in the United States, establishing this intellectual culture as distinct from classical predecessors as well as the neoliberalism that came to power by century's end. Drawing on a diverse archive that includes political philosophy, legal texts, studies of moral psychology, government propaganda, and presidential campaign materials, Afflerbach also delves into works by Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, James Agee, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, he shows how a reciprocal pattern of influence between modernist literature and liberal intellectuals helped drive the remarkable writing and rewriting of this keyword in American political life. From the 1930s into the 1960s, Afflerbach writes, modern American fiction exposed and interrogated central concerns in liberal culture, such as corporate ownership, reproductive rights, color-blind law, the tragic limits of social documentary, and the dangerous allure of a heroic style in political leaders. In response, liberal intellectuals borrowed key values from modernist culture—irony, tragedy, style—to reimagine the meaning and ambitions of American liberalism. Drawing together political theory and literary history, Making Liberalism New argues that the rise of American liberal culture helped direct the priorities of modern literature. At the same time, it explains how the ironies of narrative form offer an ideal medium for readers to examine conceptual problems in liberal thought. These problems—from the abortion debate to the scope of executive power—remain an indelible feature of American politics.

Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell

1996-05-06
Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell

Author: Edward J. Ingebretsen

Publisher: M.E. Sharpe

ISBN: 0765636239

Category: History

Page: 284

View: 798

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From its beginnings in Puritan sermonising to its prominent place in contemporary genre film and fiction, this book traces the use of terror in the American popular imagination. Entering American culture partly by way of religious sanction, it remains an important heart and mind shaping tool.