Philip Roth and the American liberal tradition

This volume offers a fresh reading of the career development of one of America's most celebrated authors.

Through a contextual analysis of a select number of texts, this study study discusses how famed novels such as 'American Pastoral' and 'The Plot against America' demonstrate Philip Roth's interest in mapping, by means of his unique literary talent, the changing shape and fortunes of American liberalism since the 1930s.

By viewing these novels and other seminal works of his later period through a wider historical lens, this book informs readers of the myriad ways in which Roth's major phase of writing since the mid-1990s has shown considerable concern with questions of class, ethnicity, race, gender, and literary culture, all of which have been key components in the shifting intellectual and political makeup of American liberal ideology from the New Deal to our present time.