03289nam 22006735 450 991048473500332120230810170936.09783030477608303047760610.1007/978-3-030-47760-8(CKB)4100000011515500(MiAaPQ)EBC6380955(DE-He213)978-3-030-47760-8(Perlego)3480986(EXLCZ)99410000001151550020201021d2020 u| 0engurnn|008mamaatxtrdacontentcrdamediacrrdacarrierAnti-Humanism in the Counterculture /by Guy Stevenson1st ed. 2020.Cham :Springer International Publishing :Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan,2020.1 online resource (VII, 223 p.) 9783030477592 3030477592 1. Introduction: Romanticism, Humanism and the Counterculture -- 2. Henry Miller and The Beats: An Anti-Humanist Precedent -- 3. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and their Transcendentalist Gloom -- 4. William Burroughs' Immodest Proposal -- 5. The Philosophy of Hip: Norman Mailer's 'Spiritual Existentialism' -- 6. Conclusion: Counterculture Then and Now.This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas - ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of iconic figures in the counterculture - the sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed 'philosopher of hip', Norman Mailer - Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its center. Between a Walt Whitman-like optimism and pessimistic modernist intuitions; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, he argues, are vital to an understanding of the cultural and political worlds these writers helped shape - in their time and beyond.Literature, Modern20th centuryAmericaLiteraturesEthnologyAmericaCulturePhilosophy of mindSelfTwentieth-Century LiteratureNorth American LiteratureAmerican CulturePhilosophy of the SelfLiterature, ModernAmericaLiteratures.EthnologyCulture.Philosophy of mind.Self.Twentieth-Century Literature.North American Literature.American Culture.Philosophy of the Self.810.9005800Stevenson Guy1224951MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910484735003321Anti-humanism in the counterculture2844213UNINA