Acknowledgements Note Introduction Chapter One: Sources Chapter Two: Genres Chapter Three: Worlds Chapter Four: Heroes Chapter Five: Streets Conclusion Works Cited
A comprehensive scholarly study of the work of Jonathan Lethem - from his fiction to his comics and music writing - and his place in the contemporary literary canon.
Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His previous books include Joyce's Critics (2004), Flann O'Brien (2005) and Literature of the 1980s (2010).
Joseph Brooker’s Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing is an
important new addition to the growing bookshelf of excellent
scholarship devoted to Lethem’s voluminous output. Wrestling
Lethem’s work free of the problematic label, postmodernism, Brooker
eschews the misleadingly tidy safety of chronological order, and
instead deftly shuffles Lethem’s fiction under a sequence of key
rubrics, to meticulously analyse the spectrum of his concerns, from
the complexities of world making to the pathos of the superheroes’
confrontation with “the indignities of mundane reality.” Attuned to
both Lethem’s place amongst his contemporaries (Egan, Franzen,
Wallace), and his skilful borrowings from the past (from DeLillo
and Dick to The Trashmen), this is a compelling and comprehensive
analysis of a major writer.
*Stephen J. Burn, Reader in American Literature after 1945, School
of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow*
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