- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press (18 July 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 069112146X
- ISBN-13: 978-0691121468
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.5 x 1.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,643,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
The Twilight of the Middle Class
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Product Description
Review
This excellent book offers an original and highly provocative argument about a vital period of American literary and cultural history. Bold and often brilliant, its graceful expository style illuminates an impressively wide range of material without ever becoming scholastic. Most importantly, it proposes new and highly plausible ways of understanding the significance of a number of important literary works.
(Sean McCann, Wesleyan University, author of "Gumshoe America" ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
(Sean McCann, Wesleyan University, author of "Gumshoe America" ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the American middle class from small property owners to white-collar employees. In the process, he produces "compelling new accounts of identity politics and postmodernism that will be of interest to anyone who reads or teaches contemporary fiction.
Hoberek argues that despite the financial gains and job security enjoyed by the postwar middle class, the transition to white-collar employment paved the way for its current precarious state in a country marked by increasingly deep class divisions. Postwar fiction provided the middle class with various imaginative substitutes for its former property-owning independence, substitutes that since then have not only allowed but abetted this class's downward mobility. To read this fiction in the light of the middle-class experience is thus not only to restore the severed connections between literary and economic "history in the second half of the twentieth "century, but to explore the roots of the contemporary crisis of the middle class.
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First Sentence
IT WASN'T TOO LONG AGO that Ayn Rand, despite her enormous and ongoing popularity, was all but invisible in the criticism and history of twentieth-century American fiction, although that has begun to change. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
IT WASN'T TOO LONG AGO that Ayn Rand, despite her enormous and ongoing popularity, was all but invisible in the criticism and history of twentieth-century American fiction, although that has begun to change. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
beautiful prose, compelling argument
21 Nov 2005
Format:Paperback
There are several very good writers among the critics whose interests and affiliations get them styled "New Americanists"; Hoberek is the best. No flashy neologisms, no sentences overburdened with allusions, no abrupt shifts in register to demonstrate his hipness, and no provocations for the purpose of getting himself talked about ("Can you believe what that guy said?"). Just simple, clear prose that synthesizes and builds upon recent thinking about the role of work in the self-image of the middle class, particularly as revealed through fiction. Hoberek's goal is to analyze and expose the fantasies of autonomy created by mental laborers (artists among them) loath to admit that they inhabit the same economic sphere as, and often are, employees; but hundreds of little ancillary insights enrich the text, locating each author under discussion in a context of literature, history, and their associated ideologies, making a reader feel that this little book encompasses a huge world of cultural analysis.
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