Abstract
The emergence and proliferation of the anti-heroic form within the 1960s creates an aesthetic rendition that mirrors the countercultural zeitgeist. Ihab Hassan notes in Rumors of Change (1959): “If the antihero seems to be enjoying just now something of an estime d’insuccès, it is probably because we have seen him often enough in the ambience of Zen, jazz, junk, and copulation.”1 However, contemporaneous criticism tends to neglect the anti-heroic as an evolving form, and instead concentrates upon emergent notions such as ‘Metafiction’, ‘Surfiction’ (reflexive forms of fiction that often focus upon structure), and ‘black humor’ (a new mode of writing typified by formal innovation and a fusion of comedy and heavy irony). Subsequently, there was a tendency for the distinct qualities of the anti-heroic figure to be ignored, as David Galloway suggests in The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (1970): “we have perhaps slighted what may well be the most important development in contemporary American fiction.”2
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Notes
Ihab Hassan, “The Anti-Hero in Modern British and American Fiction,” in Rumors of Change ( 1959; repr., Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995 ), 55–67, p. 55.
David Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction ( Austin: University of Texas Printing, 1970 ), 9.
Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, “Histories and Textuality,” in Modern Literary Theory, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, rev. ed. (1989; repr., London: Arnold, 2001 ), 252–256, p. 253.
Helen Weinberg, The New Novel in America: The Kafka Mode in Contemporary Fiction ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970 ), 11.
Tony Tanner, City of Words ( London: Jonathan Cape, 1971 ), 146.
Louis D. Rubin Jr., “The Great American Joke,” in What’s So Funny? Humor in American Culture, ed. Nancy A. Walker (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1998), 107–119. (Hereafter cited in text as WSF.)
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948; London: Paladin, 1988; London: Harper Collins, 1993), 387. Citations are to the Harper Collins edition.
Lilian R. Furst and James D. Wilson, “Editor’s Comments,” in Studies in The Literary Imagination, ed. Lilian R. Furst and James D. Wilson (Special Journal Issue), 9 (Spring 1976): 5–9, 6.
Lillian R. Furst, “The Romantic Hero, or Is He an Anti-Hero?” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, ed. Lilian R. Furst and James D. Wilson (Special Journal Issue), 9 (Spring 1976): 53–69, 53.
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Criterion, 1960; London: Granada, 1970), 33. Citations are to the Granada edition.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, rev. ed. (1884; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003 ), 51.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’ Brien (1942; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971 ), 7.
S. Beynon John, “Albert Camus: A British View,” in Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965 ), 85–91, p. 90.
Richard Lehan, “Existentialism in Recent American Fiction: The Demonic Quest,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1 (1959): 181–201, pp. 200–201.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “The Decline of Heroes,” in Heroes and Anti-Heroes, ed. Harold Lubin (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1968 ), 341–350, p. 342.
Harold Lubin, “From Anti-Hero to Non-Hero,” in Heroes and Anti-Heroes, ed. Harold Lubin (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1968 ), 310–318, p. 310.
Daniel Boorstin, The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream ( Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961 ), 59–60.
Stan Smith, A Sadly Contracted Hero—The Comic Self in Post-War American Fiction ( London: British Association for American Studies, 1981 ), 5.
Donn Pearce, Cool Hand Luke (1966; repr., London: Prion Books, 1999), 37. Citations are to the Prion edition. (Hereafter cited in the text as CHL.)
See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ( New York: Basic Books, 1990 ).
See Larry May, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988 ).
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964 ), 13–14.
Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine ( New York: Brace & World, 1967 ), 62–63.
Edward J. Rielly, The 1960s ( Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003 ), 145.
Joseph E. Brewer, “The Anti-Hero in Contemporary Literature,” Iowa English Yearbook, 12 (1967): 55–60, p. 56.
James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties ( London: Routledge, 1997 ), 69.
Robert S. Ellwood, The 60s Spiritual Awakening ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994 ), 155.
See Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses ( New York: Free Press, 1998 ).
Charles Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000 ), 15.
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 4th ed. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 32. Citations are to the 1978 Pengu in edition.
Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction ( London: Edward Arnold, 1990 ), 16.
Ronald Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Modern Literary Theory, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, rev. ed. (1989; repr., London: Arnold, 2001 ), 185–189, p. 185.
Thomas L. Hanna, “Albert Camus and the Christian Faith,” in Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965 ), 48–58, p. 48.
Charles Webb, The Graduate, rev. ed. (1963; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971 ), 12.
B.H. Fairchild, “‘Plastics’: The Graduate as Film and Novel,” Studies in American Humor, 4.3 (1985): 133–141, p. 133.
Carrol L. Fry and Jared Stein, “Isolation Imagery in The Graduate: A Contrast in Media,” Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought, 19 (1978): 203–214, p. 206.
See Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979 ).
Scott C. Holstad, “The Dialectics of Getting There: Kosinski’s Being There and The Existential Anti-Hero,” The Arkansas Review: A Journal of Criticism, 4.2 (1995): 220–228, p. 220.
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© 2008 David Simmons
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Simmons, D. (2008). The Rebel with a Cause? The Anti-Heroic Figure in American Fiction of the 1960s. In: The Anti-Hero in the American Novel. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612525_1
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