Philip Roth (Routledge Revivals)

<p>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. </p><p>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.</p>