Howard Jacobson
By David Brauner
Delivery Exc. North and South America
Delivery to North and South America
Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred BooksellerBook Information
- Format: Hardcover
- ISBN: 978-1-5261-0149-5
- Pages: 248
- Price: £85.00
- Published Date: December 2020
- Series: Contemporary British Novelists
Description
This book is available as an Open Access ebook under a CC-BY_NC-ND licence.
This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson's novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson's work. Often described by others as 'the English Philip Roth' and by himself as 'the Jewish Jane Austen', Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
Contents
Introduction
1 'Being funny': comedy, the anti-pastoral and literary politics
2 'Being men': masculinity, mortality and sexual politics
3 'Being Jewish': Philip Roth, antisemitism and the Holocaust
Afterword
Select bibliography
Index
Author
David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading