Tragedy, Affect and Labor in American Literature, 1945-2020 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Montague, Kate

Cambridge University Press（2026/10発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 216 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781009614917

Full Description

This book is a politically urgent and critically rigorous study of the re-emergence of tragedy in American literature since 1945. It argues that literature appeals to tragic forms and figures to narrate the lived experience of labor during a period of social upheaval. In the novels of William Gaddis, Sylvia Plath, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Philip Roth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the generic coordinates of tragedy attach to the precarious work-lives of multiple characters in ways that bring labor into direct conversation with a literary history of tragedy. It explores Faustian pacts in The Recognitions (1955) and the inescapable determinism of The Bell Jar (1963), through the sacrificial scapegoat and singing choruses of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the Oedipal reckoning of Blood and Guts in Highschool (1984), to the Shakespearean bloodlines of The Human Stain (2000) and the tragic forms of alienation in Americanah (2013).

Contents

Introduction: affective labor and literary affect; 1. Faustian pacts: William Gaddis' postwar melancholy; 2. Fate in a bell jar: Sylvia Plath's domestic and creative economies; 3. Displaced choruses: Thomas Pynchon's surplus populations; 4. Oedipal cut-up: Kathy Acker's neoliberal nightmare; 5. Shakespearean bloodstains: Philip Roth's American dream; Afterward: America to Americanah.