The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac is among the most important and influential writers to emerge from mid-twentieth century America. Founder of the Beat Generation literary movement, Kerouac's most famous novel, On the Road, was known as the bible of this generation, and inspired untold people to question the rigid social and cultural expectations of 1950s America. And yet despite its undeniable influence, On the Road is only a small piece of Kerouac's literary achievement, and there are now well over forty Kerouac books published. The centerpiece to this work is Kerouac's multi-volume Duluoz Legend, named for his fictional alter-ego, Jack Duluoz, and comprising numerous books written over decades that together tell the story of Duluoz's life and times. This volume offers fresh perspectives on his multifaceted body of work, ranging from detailed analyses of his most significant books to wide-angle perspectives that place Kerouac in key literary, theoretical, and cultural contexts.
- Essays offer new perspectives on Kerouac's body of work
- Essays provide both highly focused and wide-angle approaches. Some essays analyze a single work, while others place Kerouac into key cultural, theoretical, or literary contexts by examining many of his works
- Provides a granular chronology of Kerouac's life
Product details
June 2024Hardback
9781009423601
322 pages
229 × 152 × 22 mm
0.577kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Kerouac's concept of his duluoz legend Ann Charters
- 2. Kerouac and the profession of authorship Matt Theado
- 3. Truth in confession: the foundation of Kerouac's literary experiment Nancy Grace
- 4. The textuality of performance: Kerouac's spontaneous prose Tim Hunt
- 5. The spontaneous aesthetic in the subterraneans George Mouritidas
- 6. Kerouac and the 1950s Douglas Field
- 7. The impact of on the road on the sixties' counterculture Kurt Hemmer
- 8. Vanity of duluoz and the 1960s David Stephen Calonne
- 9. Late Kerouac, or the conflicted 'king of the beatniks' Steven Belletto
- 10. Visions of Cody as metafiction Michael Hrebeniak
- 11. Making the past present: Kerouac and memory Erik Mortenson
- 12. Spun rhythms: Kerouac as poet Regina Weinreich
- 13. Kerouac's representations of women Ronna Johnson
- 14. Kerouac and blackness Amor Kohli
- 15. Kerouac, multilingualism, and global culture Hassan Melehy
- 16. The two phases of Kerouac's American Buddhism Sarah Haynes
- 17. Kerouac's ambivalences as an environmental writer Franca Bellarsi
- 18. The essentials of archival prose Jean-Christophe Cloutier.
