Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century Limon John
Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to…
Specifikacia Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century Limon John
Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape-from the commodified present, from directionless history, from moral death-at a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decades-Chabon, Diaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among others-and finds that it always involves the faux utopian freedom and pseudo-messianic salvation of childhood.When contemporary novelists feature actual