Publication date:

20 September 2012

Length of book:

220 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

236x159mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739170618

Roth and Celebrity is composed of 10 original essays that consider the vexed and ambivalent relationship between Philip Roth and his own celebrity as revealed both in personal interviews as well as in the fiction that spans his publishing history. With its simultaneous interest in American popular culture and the work of the most important living American writer to-date, the collection will hold wide appeal to advanced readers in American studies, literary scholarship, and film.

Roth and Celebrity is a fascinating and varied collection of essays, exploring celebrity in relation to the literature and figure of Philip Roth. This book charts the theme, the allure, and the problem of celebrity in modern American culture as subjects that captivated Roth as a writer. At the same time, it examines Roth's own celebrity—as a young, prize-winning writer in the late 1950s, as the progenitor of the scandalous novel Portnoy's Complaint circa 1969 and then, in the 1990s and beyond, as an eminent American author. Roth and Celebrity is as much a contribution to scholarship as it is an accessible, lively introduction to Roth and his fiction.