Saul Bellow Against the Grain

Saul Bellow Against the Grain
ISBN-10
0812213696
ISBN-13
9780812213690
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
222
Language
English
Published
1991-06
Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Author
Ellen Pifer

Description

Pifer contends that Bellow's fiction is fundamentally radical. Going against the grain of contemporary culture and its secular pieties, he undermines accepted notions of reality and challenges the "orthodoxies" created by materialist values and rationalist thought. Charged by his belief in the soul, his 10 novels test the assumptions of traditional realism. Pifer stresses the importance to Bellow of the invisible world, the longing for revelation, and the capacity to love and to suffer. She also shows how Bellow's hero is a man torn between his modern predilection for secular rationalism and a primordial attachment to the soul, and how he is led to demolish reigning idols of contemporary thought and culture. ISBN 0-8122-8203-5: $29.95.

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