- Publisher: Bloomsbury
- Year: 2015
- Format: Hardback
- Pages: 242pp
- Illustrated: Yes
- Dimensions: 222x148mm
- Condition: New
- Weight: 0.5kg
- ISBN: 9781501307171
- Product code: 530165
Jonathan Franzen
The Comedy of Rage
Philip Weinstein New Hardback Illustrated
Postscript summary
From his childhood in the 1960s to the genesis of his fifth novel – Purity – this study traces the literary progress of Jonathan Franzen, probably the best-known American novelist of his generation. While discussing the novels and essays, Professor Weinstein addresses the question of the contemporary American novelist’s stance towards his audience and Franzen’s ‘high-wire act’ of reconciling both popular and elite culture.
Product information
Full publisher description
Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage is the first critical biography of one of today's most important novelists. Drawing on unpublished emails and both published and private interviews, Philip Weinstein conveys the feel and heft of Franzen's voice as he ponders the purposes and problems of his life and art, from his earliest fiction to his most recent novel, Purity.
Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?
Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.
Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: how does one appeal to a wide audience of mainstream readers, on the one hand, while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has staying power, is high art? More acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the later novels on which his reputation rests?
Wrestling with these questions, Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy of Rage unpacks the becoming of Franzen as a person and a writer-from his ultra-sensitive Midwestern childhood, through his heady years at Swarthmore College, his marriage, and the alienating decade of the 1990s, up to his spectacular ascent and assimilation into pop culture as one of the literary figures of his generation. Weinstein joins biography and criticism in ways that fully respect their differences, but that also grant that the work comes, however unpredictably, out of the life.
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530165
Jonathan Franzen
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From his childhood in the 1960s to the genesis of his fifth novel – <i>Purity</I> – this study traces the literary progress of Jonathan Franzen, probably the best-known American novelist of his generation. While discussing the novels and essays, Professor Weinstein addresses the question of the contemporary American novelist’s stance towards his audience and Franzen’s ‘high-wire act’ of reconciling both popular and elite culture.
Hardback
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rrp_info:£35.00
productId:143182
bic_code:BGL, DSBH, DSK
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£35.00
Philip Weinstein
Academic
222x148mm
Bloomsbury
No
Hardback
