Jack Kerouac Prophet Of The New Romanticism

Presents ten critical essays published between 1973 and 2001 on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and includes a chronology, a bibliography, and an introduction by Harold Bloom.

The New Romanticism is an overview of the romantic trend taken up by American novelists in the twentieth-century. Includes three classic essays by Saul bellow, Thomas Pyncheon, and Toni Morrison.

The Beat Movement was one of the most radical and innovative literary and arts movements of the 20th century, and the history of the Beat Movement is still being written in the early years of the 21st century. Unlike other kinds of literary and artistic movements, the Beat Movement is self-perpetuating. After the 1950s generation, headlined by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, a new generation arose in the 1960s led by writers such as Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, and poets from the East Side Scene. In the 1970s and 1980s writers from the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and contributors to World magazine continued the movement. The 1980s and 1990s Language Movement saw itself as an outgrowth and progression of previous Beat aesthetics. Today poets and writers in San Francisco still gather at City Lights Bookstore and in Boulder at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and continue the movement. It is now a postmodern movement and probably would be unrecognizable to the earliest Beats. It may even be in the process of finally shedding the name Beat. But the Movement continues. The Historical Dictionary of the Beat Movement covers the movement’s history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on significant people, themes, critical issues, and the most significant novels, poems, and volumes of poetry and prose that have formed the Beat canon. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Beat Movement.

Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century-and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.

Intended for teachers and students of American Literature, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of romantic tendencies in postmodernist American fiction. The book challenges the opinion expressed in the Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) and propagated by many influential scholars that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction is represented by the disjunctive and nihilistic work of such writers as Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover. Professor Alsen disagrees. He contends that this kind of fiction is not read and taught much outside an isolated but powerful circle in the academic community. It is the two-part thesis of Professor Alsen's book that the mainstream of postmodernist fiction consists of the widely read work of the Nobel Prize laureates Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison and other similar writers and that this mainstream fiction is essentially romantic. To support his argument, Professor Alsen analyzes representative novels by Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, the later John Barth, Alice Walker, William Kennedy, and Paul Auster. Professor Alsen demonstrates that the traits which distinguish the fiction of the romantic postmodernists from the fiction of their disunctive and nihilist colleagues include a vision of life that is a form of philosophical idealism, an organic view of art, modes of storytelling that are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century romance, and such themes as the nature of sin or evil, the negative effects of technology on the soul, and the quest for transcendence.