Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work Post-World War II American Fiction

Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work Post-World War II American Fiction

Hoberek, Andrew

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 069112146X
ISBN13: 9780691121468
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Aug 7 2005
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.12 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the American middle class from small property owners to white-collar employees. In the process, he produces compelling new accounts of identity politics and postmodernism that will be of interest to anyone who reads or teaches contemporary fiction.

Hoberek argues that despite the financial gains and job security enjoyed by the postwar middle class, the transition to white-collar employment paved the way for its current precarious state in a country marked by increasingly deep class divisions. Postwar fiction provided the middle class with various imaginative substitutes for its former property-owning independence, substitutes that since then have not only allowed but abetted this class's downward mobility. To read this fiction in the light of the middle-class experience is thus not only to restore the severed connections between literary and economic history in the second half of the twentieth century, but to explore the roots of the contemporary crisis of the middle class.

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