The Clown of Armageddon
The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
by Peter Freese
Hardback (Published)
(January 2009)
ISBN: 9783825355517
5.31 x 8.31 inches
Price: $112.00
In stock
The unique career of Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007), America’s first major writer to have begun his career in the paperback industry, spanned more than half a century and made him “the representative post-World War II American writer” (Morse). Between ‘Player Piano’ (1952), his prophetic depiction of tyranny by computer in the form of a more conventional dystopian novel, and ‘Timequake’ (1997), his story of a book that refused to be written, in a previously unheard-of mixture of fiction and autobiography, Vonnegut published fourteen highly accomplished novels, at least one of which, his daringly innovative ‘breakthrough novel’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ (1969), has become a widely admired modern classic. This study opens with an account of Vonnegut’s development from a neglected hack writer to an international celebrity and a brief history of the controversial reception given to a novelist whose inimitable technique combines a willfully naive style that appeals to less sophisticated readers and cutting-edge experiments that fascinate connoisseurs of metafictional experimentation. It then devotes a self-contained chapter to all of his fourteen novels, tracing their reception by critics and reviewers, explaining how each one is related to the others by recurring characters and settings as well as by the themes and motifs that haunt Vonnegut’s fictional cosmos, and combining all textual aspects and the findings of previous Vonnegut scholarship into a close reading of each novel as an accomplished piece of literary art in its own right. Providing the most detailed reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels yet published, this study confirms his status as one of the outstanding representatives of post-World War II American fiction.
- By (author) Peter Freese
Other Titles in this Series
Violence and Open Spaces
The Subversion of Boundaries and the Transformation of the Western Genre
Volume 277
Transnational Mediations
Negotiating Popular Culture between Europe and the United States
Volume 261
John F. Kennedy and the ‘Thousand Days’
New Perspectives on the Foreign and Domestic Policies of the Kennedy Administration
Volume 144
Entgrenzung der Geschichte
Eine Untersuchung zum historischen Denken der amerikanischen Postmoderne
Volume 122
Schauspiele des Sehens
Die Figur der Flaneurin, Voyeurin und Stalkerin im U.S.-amerikanischen Essay
Volume 239
Through the Bars of My Memory
Prison Life Writing and the Prison Movement of the 1970s and 1980s
Volume 319
Similar Books
Dis/United States of Vulnerability
Literary and Cultural Transgressions in U.S. Poetry Since the 1960s
Volume 330
Writing of Women as Cultural Resistance
Deconstructing Memory Legacies in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic
Becoming German American
Eine generationenübergreifende deutsche Migrationsgeschichte in Amerika nach 1945
Dark Like You
Zur medienreflexiven Modernität der Kinder- und Jugendzeitschrift ‚The Brownies’ Book‘ (1920–1921)
Volume 191
New Sacred Writing and Charisma
The Transformation of Religious Authority in Nineteenth-Century America
Tools of Control or Seeds of Liberation?
Reformed Evangelism and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum American South
Anlegerschutz beim regulären Delisting
Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung empirischer, rechtsvergleichender und rechtsökonomischer Untersuchungen
Volume 260
Das labyrinthische Bewusstsein
Figuren der Wiederholung im Zeitalter von Sidney Morgan, Hermann von Puckler-Muskau und Stendhal
Der “erzwungene” Technologietransfer in China
Darstellung und Analyse der unter dem "erzwungenen" Technologietransfer in China verstandenen Maßnahmen und Praktiken sowie deren Vereinbarkeit mit dem Welthandelsrecht
Volume 3
Der hypothetische Ersatzeingriff
Berücksichtigung hypothetischer Rechtmäßigkeit im Rahmen von Verwertungsverboten rechtswidrig erlangter Beweise im Strafprozess
Volume 310
Die Erinnerung der Hydra
Das Quilombo von Palmares in Geschichte und Gedächtnis (ca. 1595–1995): Sklaverei, Rassismus und Freiheit in Brasilien und entlang des Atlantiks
Gerichtswettbewerb und Gerichtssprache
Entscheidungsparameter, Umsetzungsmodelle und Übersetzungsprobleme
Volume 5
Kinderarbeit in den Medien
Die Beschäftigung von Kindern als Darsteller und Werbeträger unter Berücksichtigung völker- und unionsrechtlicher Aspekte
Volume 26
Maritime Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit in New York City
Rechtshistorische Betrachtung der Entwicklung einer eigenständigen maritimen Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit
Volume 228
Moderne ›alternative entities‹ in den USA
LLC, LLP und LLLP als sinnvolle Alternativen zur ›corporation‹?
Volume 279
Linguistic Representations of the Conceptual Sphere of the American South in Literary Translation
Strategies and Tactics for Rendering Ethnoculturally Marked Concepts from English into Ukrainian