A mirror in the roadway : literature and the real world /
Morris Dickstein.
- xv, 280 pages ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [259]-270) and index.
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 García Márquez) -- A fishy tale (Gunter Grass) -- Talking dogs and pioneers (S.Y. Agnon) -- Postwar fiction in context: genealogies -- Sea change: Céline 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.
0691119961 9780691119960
Literature, Modern--History and criticism.--20th century