Description
Book SynopsisThis is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer.
Table of Contents1. Introduction
2. The trials of Nathan Zuckerman, or Jewry as jury: judging Jews in Zuckerman Bound
3. The ‘credible incredible’ and the ‘incredible credible’: generic experimentation in My Life as a Man, The Counterlife, The Facts, Deception and Operation Shylock
4. Old men behaving badly: morality, mortality and masculinity in Sabbath’s Theater
5. History and the anti-pastoral: Utopian dreams and rituals of purification in the ‘American Trilogy’
6. Flights of fancy and fantasies of flight: rewriting history and retreating from trauma in The Plot Against America
Afterword