Rewriting America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation - Hardcover

Philip D. Beidler

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820312649 ISBN 13: 9780820312644

Publisher: The University of Georgia Press, 1991

Synopsis

In ""Re-Writing America"", Beidler charts the ongoing achievements of the men and women who first gained public notice as Vietnam authors and are now recognized as major literary interpreters of American national life and culture. These writers - including Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Winston Groom, David Rabe, John Balaban, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson and Frances Fitzgerald - have applied in their later efforts many of the hard-won lessons of literary sense-making learned in initial works attempting to come explicitly to terms with Vietnam. Beidler argues that the Vietnam authors have done much to re-energize American creative writing and to lead it out of the post-structuralist impasse of texts as endless critiques of language, representation and authority. With their direct experience of a divisive and frustrating war, these writers in many ways resemble the celebrated generation of poets and novelists that emerged from World War I. Like their forebears of 1914-18, the Vietnam generation has undertaken a common project of cultural revision: to ""re-write America"", to create an art that, even as it continues to acknowledge the war's painful memory, projects that memory into new dimensions of mythic consciousness for other - and better - times.

About this title

Review:

Eloquent and detailed readings of some of the most acclaimed writers to have come out of the Vietnam War, including Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, David Rabe, John Balaban, Gloria Emerson, Robert Stone, and Michael Herr . . . An excellent overview of the literary styles and achievements that have developed from a group of writers whose literary efforts began, by and large, in response to that war. The text would also be useful to anyone seeking an introduction to the literary productions of the Vietnam War.

--Journal of American History

Beidler provides a thoughtful guide to the lasting work of the war's leading novelists (Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, James Webb, Larry Heinemann, Winston Groom) and of those who wrote what he calls the literature of witness (Gloria Emerson, Frances FitzGerald, Robert Stone, Michael Herr).

--New York Times

From the Back Cover:

In this book, Beidler charts the ongoing achievements of the men and women who first gained public notice as Vietnam authors who are now recognized as major literary interpreters of our national life and culture at large.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0820312649
• ISBN 13: 9780820312644
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352