Midcentury Minor Novel

American Fiction, 1945–1965

AvMichael Kalisch

Inbunden, Engelska, 2024

Del i serien Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century

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Beskrivning

The Midcentury Minor Novel brings to light a distinctive mode of the American novel emergent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It explains how a group of neglected writers reimagined the novel as a minor form, defined by its constraints rather than its possibilities. Reflecting a broadly held view among critics that midcentury fiction was in crisis or decline, these 'minor writers' sought to make a virtue of what were taken to be the novel's bleak prospects, crafting fictions of modest proportions and seemingly attenuated ambition that reflexively explored their own aesthetic limitations. Ironically, the book argues, midcentury anxieties about the 'death of the novel' breathed new life into it. Blending literary criticism and intellectual history, the book offers close readings of five writers who shared this curious project for the novel, an account of which adds texture to our understanding of the aesthetic diversity of midcentury American literature.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2024-08-31
Mått:138 x 216 x 20 mm
Vikt:422 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century
Antal sidor:248
Förlag:Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:9781399526869

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Mer om författaren

Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021) and editor of Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays (2024).

Recensioner i media

This is literary history at its most vital. Conducting a ‘rescue mission’ for the forgotten ‘minor’ novels of mid-century America, Kalisch refocuses our understanding of the anxieties and achievements of the period more generally, and offers a welcome challenge to our own tendency ‘to ask too much of the novel’.

Innehållsförteckning

AcknowledgementsIntroduction in a Minor Key‘A refusal to be great’: Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey and The Journey Abandoned and the minor novel of ideasBreaking into laughter: Anticommunism, late modernism, and Eleanor Clark’s The Bitter Box Changing form: Jean Stafford and the limits of New CriticismHerzog in Venice: Richard Stern’s Stitch and Jewish American literary historyA lost classic: John Williams’s Stoner and the ‘rediscovery’ of the midcentury minor novelCoda: Towards a Minor CriticismBibliography

Jade Broughton Adams

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