Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography: Continuum Literary Studies

Discusses the relationship between modernism and postmodernism alongside the theory of the novel

Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA, where he teaches American and world literature.

Acknowledgements \ Preface \ 1. A Postmodern Iconography \ 2. Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan \ 3. Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night \ 4. Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater \ 5. Eternal Returns, or Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five \ 6. Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions \ 7. Imaginary Communities, or the Ends of the Political: Slapstick and Jailbird \ 8. Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard \ 9. Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos \ 10. Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake Bibliography \ Index

Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel does much to reposition Vonnegut as a major American writer. By approaching Vonnegut's oeuvre as an integrated postmodern iconography, a strategic project bridging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, Tally reveals Vonnegut to be a serious, deeply imaginative writer whose fictions intervene in major intellectual debates-political and theoretical-that continue to impact contemporary social developments.
'Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience. The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist writer.'
Robert Tally's book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a "reluctant postmodernist," a "misanthropic humanist" with modernist longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut's fourteen novels amid recent critical debates about American literature, about postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically well-informed and eminently readable.