Philip Roth »

David Brauner is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading.

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer who constantly reinvents himself in surprising ways.

Series editors' foreword     ix
Acknowledgements     xi
Introduction     1
The trials of Nathan Zuckerman, or Jewry as jury: judging Jews in Zuckerman Bound     21
The 'credible incredible and the incredible credible': generic experimentation in My Life as a Man, The Counterlife, The Facts, Deception and Operation Shylock     46
Old men behaving badly: morality, mortality and masculinity in Sabbath's Theater     122
History and the anti-pastoral: Utopian dreams and rituals of purification in the 'American Trilogy'     148
Fantasies of flight and flights of fancy: rewriting history and retreating from trauma in The Plot Against America     186
Afterword     218
Works cited     225
Index     237