Ebook: The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work

In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of postwar fiction responded to the transformation of the American middle class from small property owners to white-collar employees. In the process, he produces "compelling new accounts of identity politics and postmodernism that will b.;Contents; Acknowledgments; INTRODUCTION: The Twilight of the Middle Class; CHAPTER ONE: Ayn Rand and the Politics of Property; CHAPTER TWO: Race Man, Organization Man, Invisible Man; CHAPTER THREE: "The So-Called Jewish Novel"; CHAPTER FOUR: Flannery O'Connor and the Southern Origins of Identity Politics; EPILOGUE The Postmodern Fallacy; Notes; Index.