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).

This is a useful book that opens up other, potentially significant, avenues for future research. It aligns well with the recent interest in questions of scale and form being undertaken by ecocriticism and the “new formalism,” although Kalisch does not make this claim directly. These “minor” novels also touch on the social construction of whiteness and the operations of social class in educational institutions at mid-century in illuminating ways.

• 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

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).

This is a useful book that opens up other, potentially significant, avenues for future research. It aligns well with the recent interest in questions of scale and form being undertaken by ecocriticism and the “new formalism,” although Kalisch does not make this claim directly. These “minor” novels also touch on the social construction of whiteness and the operations of social class in educational institutions at mid-century in illuminating ways.

• 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

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).

This is a useful book that opens up other, potentially significant, avenues for future research. It aligns well with the recent interest in questions of scale and form being undertaken by ecocriticism and the “new formalism,” although Kalisch does not make this claim directly. These “minor” novels also touch on the social construction of whiteness and the operations of social class in educational institutions at mid-century in illuminating ways.

• 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