After utopia : the rise of critical space in twentieth-century American fiction /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Spencer, Nicholas, 1966-
Imprint:Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, ©2006.
Description:1 online resource (x, 271 pages)
Language:English
Subject:
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11143423
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:0803253974
9780803253971
1280466324
9781280466328
9786610466320
6610466327
9780803243019
0803243014
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-260) and index.
Restrictions unspecified
Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010.
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212
English.
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Print version record.
Summary:By developing the concept of critical space, After Utopia presents a new genealogy of twentieth-century American fiction. Nicholas Spencer argues that the radical American fiction of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Josephine Herbst reimagines the spatial concerns of late nineteenth-century utopian American texts. Instead of fully imagined utopian societies, such fiction depicts localized utopian spaces that provide essential support for the models of history on which these authors focus. In the midcentury novels of Mary McCarthy and Paul Goodman and the late twentieth-century fiction of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Joan Didion, and Don DeLillo, narratives of social space become decreasingly utopian and increasingly critical. The highly varied "critical space" of such texts attains a position similar to that enjoyed by representations of historical transformation in early twentieth-century radical American fiction. After Utopia finds that central aspects of postmodern American novels derive from the overtly political narratives of London, Sinclair, Dos Passos, and Herbst.
Other form:Print version: Spencer, Nicholas, 1966- After utopia. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, ©2006 0803243014
Govt.docs classification:U5002 T147 -2006