| Description |
xv, 280 p. ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-270) and index. |
| Contents |
A mirror in the roadway -- American realism: the sense of time and place -- The city as text: New York and the American writer -- The second city (Chicago writers) -- Upton Sinclair and the urban jungle -- A radical comedian (Sinclair Lewis) -- The magic of contradictions: Willa Cather's lost lady -- A different world: from realism to modernism -- The authority of failure (F. Scott Fitzgerald) -- Edmund Wilson: three phases -- A glint of malice (Mary McCarthy) -- Silence, exile, cunning -- The modern writer as exile -- An outsider in his own life (Samuel Beckett) -- Kafka in love -- Hope against hope: Orwell and the future -- Magical realism -- The pornography of power (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) -- A fishy tale (Gunter Grass) -- Talking dogs and pioneers (S.Y. Agnon) -- Postwar fiction in context: genealogies -- Sea change: Celine in America -- The complex fate of the Jewish American writer -- The face in the mirror: the eclipse of distance in contemporary fiction -- Ordinary people: Carver, Ford, and blue-collar realism -- Textures of memory -- Late Bellow: thinking about the dead -- Saints and sinners: William Kennedy's Albany cycle -- Reading and history -- Damaged literacy: the decay of reading -- Finding the right words (Irving Howe) -- The social uses of fiction (Martha Nussbaum) -- The limits of historicism: literary theory and historical understanding. |
| Summary |
In this collection of essays, Morris Dickstein focuses on the rich interchange of ideas between writers such as Kafka, Celine, Carver, Bellow & Kennedy, and the world around them: the lives that formed them, the places they write about, & the social changes they make indelibly real to us. |
| Subject |
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
|
| ISBN |
0691119961 (alk. paper) |
|
9780691119960 (alk. paper) |
|
