Philip Roth

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways. At the heart of this book are a number of detailed and nuanced readings of Roth’s works both in terms of their relationships with each other and with fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien, Brett Easton Ellis, Stanley Elkin, Howard Jacobson and Jonathan Safran Foer. Brauner identifies as a thread running through all of Roth’s work the use of paradox, both as a rhetorical device and as an organising intellectual and ideological principle. There are chapters here on Roth’s use in Zuckerman Bound of legalistic language to explore the ethical and aesthetic conflicts faced by the post-war Jewish-American writer; on generic experimentation in My Life as a Man , The Counterlife , The Facts , Deception and Operation Shylock ; on the treatment of morality, mortality and masculinity in Roth’s masterpiece, Sabbath’s Theater ; on the deconstruction of Utopian dreams and rituals of purification in the American Trilogy ; and finally on the relationship between history and fiction, and trauma and imagination, in The Plot Against America . Indispensable to Roth scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study will also be of great interest to general readers and to students and teachers of English and American literature, American Studies and Jewish Studies. Old devotees will be encouraged to return to, and new readers to discover, Roth’s work.