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[headline]Recovers a forgotten and short-lived form of American fiction: the midcentury minor novel The Midcentury Minor Novel brings to light a distinctive mode of the American novel emergent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It explains how a group of neglected writers reimagined the novel as a minor form, defined by its constraints rather than its possibilities. Reflecting a broadly held view among critics that midcentury fiction was in crisis or decline, these 'minor writers' sought to make a virtue of what were taken to be the novel's bleak prospects, crafting fictions of modest proportions and seemingly attenuated ambition that reflexively explored their own aesthetic limitations. Ironically, Kalisch argues, midcentury anxieties about the 'death of the novel' breathed new life into it. Blending literary criticism and intellectual history, this book offers close readings of five writers, Eleanor Clark, Lionel Trilling, Jean Stafford, Richard Stern and John Williams, who shared this curious project for the novel, an account of which adds texture to our understanding of the aesthetic diversity of midcentury American literature. [bio]Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of
The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021) and editor of
Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays (2024).
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Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of
The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021) and editor of
Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays (2024).
Riassunto
Recovers a forgotten and short-lived form of American fiction: the midcentury minor novel
