A01=Andrew Hoberek
African Americans
Alfred Kazin
Allegory
American middle class
Americans
Anti-communism
Atlas Shrugged
Author_Andrew Hoberek
Ayn Rand
Black people
Bourgeoisie
Capitalism
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
Criticism
Derek
Don DeLillo
Employment
Entrepreneurship
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Ethos
Exclusion
Gerald Graff
Huckleberry Finn
Identity politics
Ideology
Income
Individualism
Institution
Invisible Man
Irony
Irving Howe
Jack Kerouac
Jewish identity
Jews
Laborer
Leslie Fiedler
Literature
Marxism
Middle class
Modernism
Modernity
Mr.
Mrs.
Narrative
Novel
Novelist
Ownership
Plantation era
Politics
Populism
Post-industrial society
Postmodernism
Prager
Proletarianization
Racism
Ralph Ellison
Salary
Saul Bellow
Small business
Social criticism
Southernization
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
The Organization Man
The Other Hand
Thomas Pynchon
University of Chicago Press
Vladimir Nabokov
Walter Benn Michaels
White-collar worker
Wise Blood
Workforce
World War II
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691121468
- Weight: 255g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 07 Aug 2005
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Andrew Hoberek is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
