04260nam 2200745 a 450 991079239850332120200520144314.097866121584141-4008-2681-01-282-15841-40-691-12145-110.1515/9781400826810(CKB)2560000000324404(EBL)457827(OCoLC)439018510(SSID)ssj0000263158(PQKBManifestationID)11225338(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000263158(PQKBWorkID)10272219(PQKB)10470462(MdBmJHUP)muse43020(DE-B1597)453550(OCoLC)979592494(DE-B1597)9781400826810(Au-PeEL)EBL457827(CaPaEBR)ebr10312430(CaONFJC)MIL215841(MiAaPQ)EBC457827(EXLCZ)99256000000032440420041025d2005 uy 0engur|n|---|||||txtccrThe twilight of the middle class[electronic resource] post-World War II American fiction and white-collar work /Andrew HoberekCourse BookPrinceton, N.J. Princeton University Pressc20051 online resource (169 p.)Princeton paperbacksDescription based upon print version of record.0-691-12146-X Includes bibliographical references (p. [131]-154) and index.Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION: The Twilight of the Middle Class -- CHAPTER ONE: Ayn Rand and the Politics of Property -- CHAPTER TWO: Race Man, Organization Man, Invisible Man -- CHAPTER THREE: "The So-Called Jewish Novel" -- CHAPTER FOUR: Flannery O'Connor and the Southern Origins of Identity Politics -- EPILOGUE: The Postmodern Fallacy -- Notes -- IndexIn 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.Princeton paperbacks.American fiction20th centuryHistory and criticismMiddle class in literatureLiterature and societyUnited StatesHistory20th centuryWorld War, 1939-1945United StatesLiterature and the warWhite collar workers in literatureAmerican fictionHistory and criticism.Middle class in literature.Literature and societyHistoryWorld War, 1939-1945Literature and the war.White collar workers in literature.813/.54093552Hoberek Andrew1967-1501661MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910792398503321The twilight of the middle class3728940UNINA