The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow

Description

Saul Bellow is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American literature. Bellow's work explores the most important cultural and social experiences of his era: the impact of the Holocaust, the urban experience of European immigrants from a Jewish perspective, the fraught failures of the Vietnam War, the ideological seductions of Marxism and Modernism, and the changing attitudes concerning gender and race. This Companion demonstrates the complexity of this formative writer by emphasizing the ways in which Bellow's works speak to the changing conditions of American identity and culture from the post-war period to the turn of the twenty-first century. Individual chapters address the major themes of Bellow's work over more than a half-century of masterfully crafted fiction, articulating some of the most significant cultural experiences of the American twentieth century. It provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of a key figure in American literature.

Victoria Aarons is the O. R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, Texas. She is the author of A Measure of Memory (1996) and What Happened to Abraham (2005), both recipients of the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book; and the co-editor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (2014), and Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute (2016). She is co-author of Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory and editor of Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction, both published in 2016. Aarons has published over seventy scholarly articles and is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Women in Judaism, and Verbeia, Journal of English and Spanish Studies. She serves as a judge for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award.

'A wonderful characteristic of this volume is that one can often 'hear' Bellow himself in dialogue with his critics and readers.' CHOICE