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Jonathan Franzen and the romance of community : narratives of salvation / Jesús Blanco Hidalga

Author
Hidalga, Jesús Blanco
Published
New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Physical Description
1 online resource
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Contents
Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Acknowledgements; Preface; List of Abbreviations; Chapter 1 Introduction: A formal and ideological approach to Jonathan Franzen ' s fiction ; 1 Jonathan Franzen ' s relevance to contemporary American culture ; 2 Narratives and metanarratives: The conversion ; 3 Theoretical coordinates: Socially symbolic narratives ; 4 Questions of mode: The end of postmodernism? ; 5 What we talk about when we talk of realism ; 6 Realism, contingency and the weight of inherited forms ; 7 Realism, totality and late capitalism., 8 The problem of perspective 9 Community issues ; Chapter 2 Knowable conspiracies: The Twenty-Seventh City ; 1 Introduction: Striking up a conversation ; 2 Mapping ' the inner city of fiction ' ; 3 Vanishing city: The wasteland of vacant lots ; 4 City of boredom: Highways, malls and the hunger for the Event ; 5 Visions of (second) nature: Songbirds and concrete ; 6 Suburban sprawl and the quest for orientation ; 7 Conspiracy or the end of the public sphere ; 8 The (non- )politics of irony: Agency and apathy., 9 Systemic paralysis and Utopian drives 10 Nostalgias of the industrial age ; 11 History, form and ideology ; Chapter 3 Strong Motion : Activism of the private sphere ; 1 Introduction: Reassessing Franzen ' s disavowal ; 2 Family affairs ; 3 Geophysics of the Other ; 4 Natural history and historical nature ; 5 The quest for truth in Risikogesellschaft ; 6 Urban novel and novelistic city ; 7 Agency and community: Liberals and radicals ; 8 Perspectives of salvation ; 9 The novel and the problem of alterity., Chapter 4 The Corrections : A family romance for the global age 1 Introduction: The Corrections as a hybrid novel ; 2 Postmodernist essentials: Conspiracies, representation, visions of the self ; 3 The realism of The Corrections ; 4 Suburban ambiguities ; 5 On the House : Domestic symbolism in The Corrections ; 6 Family pictures and social elegies: Franzen ' s sympathetic types ; 7 The end of the era of hardware ; 8 Problems of perspective in the postmodern scene ; 9 The search for community in post-historical times., and Chapter 5 How to close a (meta)narrative: Freedom 1 Introduction: Freedom as a destination ; 2 Guilty (liberal) pleasures ; 3 Beaten up by rednecks: Class discourse and ideology ; 4 Franzen and the culture wars ; 5 Enlightened elites and fear of populism ; 6 The insidious charm of the ruling class ; 7 Aurea mediocritas : Franzen ' s middle-class ideal ; 8 Beyond the war: Salvation and reconciliation ; 9 Keeping it in the family ; 10 The politics of environmentalism: Failure and salvation ; 11 The elephant in the room.
Summary
"Despite the success and significance of Jonathan Franzen's fiction, his work has received little scholarly attention. Aiming to fill this conspicuous gap, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community analyses each of Franzen's five novels in chronological order to reveal an interior logic animating his work. Jesús Blanco Hidalga integrates often separated formal and ideological perspectives to illuminate Franzen's stylistic and narrative choices, and in so doing, he discovers the concepts, typical of romance narratives, of salvation and redemption running throughout Franzen's fiction. Hidalga shows how these salvation narratives are used for self-legitimization -- not only by the characters, but by the writer himself. The author further re-assesses Franzen's use of realism and explores each novel within its cultural and political context. Combining critical rigor with interpretative boldness, Hidalga offers a solid theoretical approach to a major contemporary author."--
"Working within theoretical and critical contexts, Hidalga applies a model of the conversion/redemption narrative to the novels of Jonathan Franzen"--
Subject(s)
Genre(s)
ISBN
9781501319853 (electronic bk.)
150131985X (electronic bk.)
9781501319860 (online)
1501319868
9781501319846
1501319841
9781501319839 (hardback)
1501319833 (hardback)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 43653243