The Midcentury Minor Novel - (Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century) by Michael Kalisch (Hardcover)

About the Book

Recovers a forgotten and short-lived form of American fiction: the midcentury minor novel

Book Synopsis

The Midcentury Minor Novel brings to light a distinctive mode of the American novel emergent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It explains how a group of neglected writers reimagined the novel as a minor form, defined by its constraints rather than its possibilities. Reflecting a broadly held view among critics that midcentury fiction was in crisis or decline, these 'minor writers' sought to make a virtue of what were taken to be the novel's bleak prospects, crafting fictions of modest proportions and seemingly attenuated ambition that reflexively explored their own aesthetic limitations. Ironically, the book argues, midcentury anxieties about the 'death of the novel' breathed new life into it. Blending literary criticism and intellectual history, the book offers close readings of five writers who shared this curious project for the novel, an account of which adds texture to our understanding of the aesthetic diversity of midcentury American literature.

From the Back Cover

[headline]Recovers a forgotten and short-lived form of American fiction: the midcentury minor novel The Midcentury Minor Novel brings to light a distinctive mode of the American novel emergent in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It explains how a group of neglected writers reimagined the novel as a minor form, defined by its constraints rather than its possibilities. Reflecting a broadly held view among critics that midcentury fiction was in crisis or decline, these 'minor writers' sought to make a virtue of what were taken to be the novel's bleak prospects, crafting fictions of modest proportions and seemingly attenuated ambition that reflexively explored their own aesthetic limitations. Ironically, Kalisch argues, midcentury anxieties about the 'death of the novel' breathed new life into it. Blending literary criticism and intellectual history, this book offers close readings of five writers, Eleanor Clark, Lionel Trilling, Jean Stafford, Richard Stern and John Williams, who shared this curious project for the novel, an account of which adds texture to our understanding of the aesthetic diversity of midcentury American literature. [bio]Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021) and editor of Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays (2024).

Review Quotes

This is literary history at its most vital. Conducting a 'rescue mission' for the forgotten 'minor' novels of mid-century America, Kalisch refocuses our understanding of the anxieties and achievements of the period more generally, and offers a welcome challenge to our own tendency 'to ask too much of the novel'.--Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge

About the Author

Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021) and editor of Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays (2024).