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Styron's Sophie's Choice, Jews and Other Marginals, and the Mainstream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Extract

Originally the paper on which this article is based was entitled “The Cultural Politics of Southern and Jewish Writers” — which is a fine title and subject but, of course, much too broad, requiring book-length treatment for adequate development. If I were to write such a book, I would be concerned with the energies and strategies used by key writers representative of these groups (concerns I would consider paradigmatic for regional, ethnic, and other “marginal” phenomena in American culture) as they launched an assault on, infiltrated, charmed, or recast the mold and idea of the national literature.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

NOTES

Author's note: This article is based on a paper delivered at the American Studies Association Meeting, October 31, 1981, for a panel on Regionalism and Ethnicity in American Literature.

1. See the sociologically important chapter in Goldman, Albert's Ladies and Gentlemen — Lenny Bruce!! (New York: Random House, 1974)Google Scholar, entitled “How Sick Humor Came Up the River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, Along the Gowanus Parkway (42nd Street Exit),” for one aspect of this cultural change.

2. Turner, Victor, Drama, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), p. 255.Google Scholar

3. Book World, 05 20, 1979, E6.Google Scholar

4. Chametzky, Jules, “Our Decentralized Literature: A Consideration of Regional, Ethnic, Racial and Sexual Factors,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 17 (Heidelberg, 1972), 5672.Google Scholar

5. Smith, Henry Nash, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), chap. 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Bercovitch, Sacvan, “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution,” The Massachusetts Review 17 (Winter 1976), 597630.Google Scholar