Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation

Description

Despite the success and significance of Jonathan Franzen's fiction, his work has received relatively little scholarly attention. Aiming to fill this conspicuous gap, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community analyzes each of Franzen's five novels in chronological order to reveal an interior logic animating his work. Integrating various formal and ideological perspectives to illuminate Franzen's work, Jesus Blanco Hidalga demonstrates that the concepts of salvation and redemption, typical of romance narratives, run throughout Franzen's fiction. Even as he re-assesses and expands the familiar interpretations of Franzen's work, Blanco Hidalga shows how these salvation narratives are used for self-legitimization not only by the characters, but by the writer himself. Combining critical rigor with interpretative boldness, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community offers a new theoretical approach to a major contemporary author.

Jesus Blanco Hidalga is an independent scholar who collaborates with the Department of English of the University of Cordoba, Spain.

It is rare to find an author equally abreast of the theoretical discussion regarding the possibilities and limits of the novel as this has been carried out by British, Continental, and American academics, and as widely read in the Western canon, and notably postmodern and neo-realist American literature, to make continually apt comparisons and to illuminate an abstract point with the telling detail, so as to deliver an intelligent, well-written commentary on the work to date of the most creative recent American author, Jonathan Franzen - but Hidalga is this man. * The Heythrop Journal * An important contribution to the scholarship developing around Jonathan Franzen's work. Blanco-Hidalga offers an intriguing and persuasive argument using a model of the conversion/redemption narrative to explain not only the paths Franzen's characters take, but also his own, self-dramatized writing career. Complicating and opening up our understanding of Franzen's work, Blanco Hidalga liberates it from the box some critics-and even Franzen himself-have constructed around it. * Robert L. McLaughlin, Professor of English, Illinois State University, USA * Patiently engaging the entirety of Franzen's growing corpus of major novels, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community offers a much-needed contribution to the reading of this major novelist. Analytically incisive, interpretively nuanced, Blanco Hidalga's timely monograph demands the attention of all students of contemporary American fiction. * Jerry A. Varsava, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Alberta, Canada *