The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth - (Bloomsbury Handbooks) by Aimee Pozorski & Maren Scheurer (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth provides a comprehensive, must-have survey of interdisciplinary scholarship on one of the major American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth presents state-of-the-art scholarship on new research methods, current debates, and future directions in Philip Roth studies. It illuminates how Roth, one of the most influential American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, not only reflected American history and culture in his important novels but uncannily anticipated our American future.

Divided into six main sections, this Handbook considers such topics:

- The full range of Roth's writing, from his novels and short stories to essays and life writing
- Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives across literary studies, politics, gender studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism
- Roth's literary legacy across contemporary fiction, Jewish literature, the arts, and culture studies
- Key contexts including American political movements since the 1950s, the American Jewish experience, and intertextual relationships

Uniting scholars and artists who have built the field of Philip Roth studies from the ground up along with emergent scholars from around the world, this Handbook includes chapter summaries, study questions, and an author biography and timeline that includes key dates in Roth's life and publication history. It also contains a bibliography of secondary sources for further reading as well as an overview of film and television adaptations.

Review Quotes

"A rich collection of discursive takes on America's leading novelist of the late twentieth century, a writer no less controversial - and essential - now than he was at the start of his long, fertile and explosive writing life." --Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University, USA

"It's well known that Philip Roth courted disapproval and thrived on giving offense. What's less well known is that his fiction is an intellectual feast and an incomparable scrutiny of modern life. This wide-ranging collection helps us acknowledge the breadth and scale of Roth's significance." --Patrick Hayes, Fellow of St John's College, University of Oxford, UK

"The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth is the authoritative volume on contemporary approaches to Roth's work. Combining new scholarly voices with established Roth experts, the volume examines Roth's complex representations of women, race, and sexualities. The volume offers formal approaches to this most literary of American writers, as well as careful examinations of the difficulty of Roth's reputation. Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer have compiled a rich and fascinating guide through the territory of Roth's life, research, interests, and writings. This is a wonderful guide for Roth readers old and new!" --Catherine Morley, Professor and Head of School of Arts, University of Leicester, UK

About the Author

Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, USA, where she also directs the English graduate program and co-directs the program in American Studies. She is the author of AIDS-Trauma and Politics (2019), Falling After 9-11: Art and Literature in Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) (Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2011). She is Co-executive Editor, with Maren Scheurer, of Philip Roth Studies, and is past President of the Philip Roth Society (2009-2015).

Maren Scheurer is a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department for Comparative Literature and in the Department for English and American Studies at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is Co-executive Editor, with Aimee Pozorski, of Philip Roth Studies.