On its original publication in 1982 this book was the first full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century writer. As well as setting the novelist’s work in the context of Jewish-American writing (and Jewish-American families) and twentieth-century American politics, the book explores the characteristic paradoxes in Roth: self-disgust and self-consciousness, restraint and letting go, nausea and appetite, energy and frustration, stylishness and vulgarity, surrealism and the mundane.
Roth is a highly literary and referential character and an assessment is made of the conflicting influnces on his work of Kafka, Checkov, Gogol, Henry James, Melville and Henry Youngman, a Jewish nightclub and Vaudeville comic. In addition a close examination of his anxious, revolting, garrulous heroes, their mothers, their marriages, their shrinks, and their shiksas is undertaken and a deep seriousness is discovered, co-existing with Roth’s comic brashness and bravura.
By:
Hermione Lee (Wolfson College Oxford)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 198mm,
Width: 129mm,
Spine: 12mm
Weight: 60g
ISBN: 9780415562416
ISBN 10: 0415562414
Series: Routledge Revivals
Pages: 104
Publication Date: 03 November 2009
Audience:
College/higher education
,
A / AS level
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
1. ‘Are you Finished?’ 2. ‘Nathan Dedalus’: Jewish sons, Jewish Novelists, Jewish Jokes 3. ‘Beyond the Pale’: American Reality from the Second World War to Watergate 4. ‘You Must Change Your Life’: Mentors, Doubles and Literary Influences in the Search for Self 5. Finishing
