American Anti-Pastoral (eBook)

Brookside, New Jersey and the Garden State of Philip Roth

Thomas Gustafson (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2024
222 Seiten
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
978-1-9788-3805-5 (ISBN)

Infos

One of the best-known novels taking place in New Jersey, Philip Roth's 1997 American Pastoral uses the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock, NJ as a microcosm for a nation in crisis during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s-70s. Critics have called Old Rimrock mythic, but it is based on a very real place: the small Morris county town of Brookside, New Jersey.American Anti-Pastoral reads the events in Roth s novel in relation to the history of Brookside and its region. While Roth s protagonist Seymour Swede Levov initially views Old Rimrock as an idyllic paradise within the Garden State, its real-world counterpart has a more complex past in its origins as a small industrial village, as well as a site for the politics of exclusionary zoning and a 1960s anti-war protest at its celebrated 4th of July parade. Literary historian and Brookside native Thomas Gustafson casts Roth s canonical novel in a fresh light as he studies both Old Rimrock in comparison to Brookside and the novel in relationship to NJ literature, making a case for it as the Great New Jersey novel. For Roth fans and history buffs alike, American Anti-Pastoral peels back the myths about the bucolic Garden State countryside to reveal deep fissures along the fault-lines of race and religion in American democracy.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.6.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Regional- / Landesgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• ISBN-10: 1-9788-3805-0 / 1978838050
• ISBN-13: 978-1-9788-3805-5 / 9781978838055