In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a naive notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society.

In this book, Morris Dickstein reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of twentieth-century writers, from realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, through modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, to wildly inventive postwar writers like Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dickstein argues that fiction will always yield rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding. Writers refract the world through their forms and sensibilities. He shows how the work of these writers recaptures--yet also transforms--the life around them, the world inside them, and the universe of language and feeling they share with their readers.

Through lively and incisive essays directed to general readers as well as students of literature, Dickstein redefines the literary landscape--a landscape in which reading has for decades been devalued by society and distorted by theory. Having begun with a reconsideration of realism, the book concludes with several essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.

"Beginning with how American writers like Whitman, Melville, Wharton, Ellison and Bellow variously depicted life in New York City, literary critic Dickstein (Gates of Eden) examines an array of authors in relation to their historical moments and explores the significance of how they represented their worlds. Dickstein, who openly expresses his reservations about poststructuralist and new historicist approaches to literary criticism, writes in what he calls a 'tradition that is intuitive, experiential, historicist and semi-sociological.' A section on representations of Chicago compares Theodore Dreiser's 'canny social history' of that city in Sister Carrie with Upton Sinclair's more crudely journalistic novel The Jungle. In additional essays Dickstein makes a case for the social awareness of F. Scott Fitzgerald's late, Depression-era writing, and reflects on the notion of alienation and on the enigmatic sensibilities of Kafka and Beckett. The author, a professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, is at his most persuasive when tracing the French writer Cline's influence on American black humorists of the '60s such as Philip Roth and when assessing the cultural forces that have shaped the styles of such American Jewish writers as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Delmore Schwartz, Paul Goodman and I.B. Singer. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

?In twenty lucid and insightful essays, Dickstein celebrates the enduring power of the novel?. The New Yorker

"He deftly demarcates historical and aesthetic patterns of influence that fuel a writer?s oeuvre and its reception. Highly recommended." Lee Ehlers, Library Journal

"Twenty illuminating essays ... on literature's elusive, prophetic interpretations of a changing American society.... A fine, accessible collection." Kirkus Review

Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a widely published literary and cultural critic. His work has appeared in the "New York Times Book Review", the "Times Literary Supplement", "Partisan Review", "The Nation", and the "Chronicle of Higher Education". His books include "Gates of Eden: American culture in the 1960's", nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and "Leopards in the Temple", a study of postwar American fiction.

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: A Mirror in the Roadway 1

American Realism: The Sense of Time and Place

The City as Text: New York and the American Writer 17

The Second City (Chicago Writers) 36

Upton Sinclair and the Urban Jungle 41

A Radical Comedian (Sinclair Lewis) 51

The Magic of Contradictions: Willa Cather's Lost Lady 60

A Different World: From Realism to Modernism

The Authority of Failure (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 77

Edmund Wilson: Three Phases 89

A Glint of Malice (Mary McCarthy) 96

Silence, Exile, Cunning 104

The Modern Writer as Exile 104

An Outsider in His Own Life (Samuel Beckett) 115

Kafka in Love 119

Hope against Hope: Orwell and the Future 126

Magical Realism 137

The Pornography of Power (Gabriel García Márquez) 137

A Fishy Tale (Günter Grass) 140

Talking Dogs and Pioneers (S. Y. Agnon) 144

Postwar Fiction in Context: Genealogies

Sea Change: Céline in America 153

The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer 168

The Face in the Mirror: The Eclipse of Distance

in Contemporary Fiction 184

Ordinary People: Carver, Ford, and Blue-Collar Realism 199

Textures of Memory 209

Late Bellow: Thinking About the Dead 209

Saints and Sinners: William Kennedy's Albany Cycle 214

Reading and History

Damaged Literacy: The Decay of Reading 223

Finding the Right Words (Irving Howe) 234

The Social Uses of Fiction (Martha Nussbaum) 243

The Limits of Historicism: Literary Theory

and Historical Understanding 248

Sources 259

Index 271