Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel

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Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel explores the unstable construction of heteronormative white masculinity in the contemporary United States by focusing on relationships between fathers and their children. Debra Shostak reads the novels of 18 North American writers publishing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as allegories of cultural conflict and change within the nuclear family; the authors considered include Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, John Irving, Jonathan Lethem, Carole Maso, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Claire Messud, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tim O'Brien, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, Mona Simpson, Jane Smiley, and Anne Tyler. These novelists portray father figures who, often literally or figuratively absent from the family scene, disrupt the familial order and their family members' identities. Shostak's close readings illuminate unexpectedly conservative, even subversive, ideological positions at the heart of these fictions. Fictive Fathers traces the eroding myth of paternal authority that sustained a patriarchal model within real American families and their literary representations.

Reviews

What does it mean to be a father What does it mean to be a part of a family In Fictive Fathers, Debra Shostak exposes the fantasy of the American middle-class family as it gives way to the demands of the 21st century. This richly nuanced study of generational and gendered familial dynamics paints a provocative portrait of the shifting if often unsteady repositioning of patriarchal authority in response to the changing social and political landscape of American culture. In doing so, Shostak redefines the shape and scaffolding of the American family, exposing both the limitations and the seductions of the myth of the family in a culture that welcomes and at the same time resists such a re-envisioning of gender roles and the authority of the father. * Victoria Aarons, O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature, Trinity University, USA, and editor of The New Jewish American Literary Studies (2019) *
Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel is by far the best book in its field. It offers nuanced, revelatory readings of a wide range of contemporary American fiction while at the same time making a vital contribution to our understanding of the key issues of our time: class, race, gender, and the relationship between personal and national politics. It will be essential reading not just for students and scholars of contemporary fiction but for anyone interested in fatherhood and masculinity in post-war America. * David Brauner, Professor of Contemporary Literature, The University of Reading, UK, and author of Contemporary American Fiction (2010) *
Fictive Fathers is an exemplary study of a fascinating subject. Shostak displays the critical acuity typical of all her work in this analysis of missing and flawed fathers in postwar North American fiction. Wide ranging in its choice of texts but firmly focused on its central argument, this is a persuasive, engaging, and authoritative account of the ways in which the myths of fatherhood shape contemporary masculinity and family dynamics. * Sarah Graham, Associate Professor in American Literature, University of Leicester, UK *
Informed by a sophisticated deployment of psychoanalytic theory backed with a supple sense of history, Debra Shostaks important Fictive Fathers in the Contemporary American Novel addresses an impressive array of American novels to explore and challenge the hetero-normative fantasy of normative Western manhood as the symbolic center of the social order. A true feat of daring critical range and virtuosity, this work is one of the best studies available of the American novel in the post-World War II, postmodern era. * Timothy Parrish, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis, USA *

Author Bio

Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature at The College of Wooster, USA. She is the author of Philip RothCountertexts, Counterlives (2004) and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America (Bloomsbury, 2011).