Philip Roth (Routledge Revivals) - Hardcover

Lee, Hermione

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415562414 ISBN 13: 9780415562416

Publisher: Routledge, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Wolfson College, Oxford

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415562414
• ISBN 13: 9780415562416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104