| The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work Subjects: American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Middle class in literature; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th century; World War 1939–1945 -- United States -- Literature and the war; White collar workers in literature; 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 be of interest to anyone who reads or teaches contemporary fiction. Andrew Hoberek is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. |