American Anti-Pastoral : Brookside, New Jersey and the Garden State of Philip Roth / Thomas Gustafson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gustafson, Thomas, 1953- author.

Series:

Ceres: Rutgers studies in history.

CERES: Rutgers Studies in History Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Roth, Philip, 1933-2018--Criticism and interpretation.

Roth, Philip.

Roth, Philip, 1933-2018. American pastoral.

New Jersey--In literature.

New Jersey.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (223 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2024]

Summary:

One of the best-known novels taking place in New Jersey, Philip Roth’s 1997 American Pastoral uses the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock, NJ as a microcosm for a nation in crisis during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s-70s. Critics have called Old Rimrock mythic, but it is based on a very real place: the small Morris county town of Brookside, New Jersey. American Anti-Pastoral reads the events in Roth’s novel in relation to the history of Brookside and its region. While Roth’s protagonist Seymour “Swede” Levov initially views Old Rimrock as an idyllic paradise within the Garden State, its real-world counterpart has a more complex past in its origins as a small industrial village, as well as a site for the politics of exclusionary zoning and a 1960s anti-war protest at its celebrated 4th of July parade. Literary historian and Brookside native Thomas Gustafson casts Roth’s canonical novel in a fresh light as he studies both Old Rimrock in comparison to Brookside and the novel in relationship to NJ literature, making a case for it as the Great New Jersey novel. For Roth fans and history buffs alike, American Anti-Pastoral peels back the myths about the bucolic Garden State countryside to reveal deep fissures along the fault-lines of race and religion in American democracy.

Contents:

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Prologue

Part I: Dismal Harmony

1. The Office of Letters and the Bomb: Brookside and Old Rimrock

2. Fourth of July Parade

3. Indigenous American Berserk

4. Fig Leaf: The Voice of the Pastoral

5. Walled Garden

Part II: Babel

6. All Babel Breaks Loose

7. Inside the Territory: Myth and History

8. Harmony: Bill Orcutt's WASP History Tour

9. Dissonance: Bucky Robinson's Jewish History Tour

10. Counterfactual: Beatrice and George Jenkins Sr.'s Black History Tour of Morristown

11. On the Dead-End Dirt Road: The Quiet Babel of Stoney Hill Road and Where Goodbye Newark Meets Goodbye Orchard

12. Brookside Bards: Steven Cramer's Poetry of Protest and Christopher Merrill's Poetry of Place

Part III: Pentecost Remembered and Lost

13. Brookside against the Current

14. NIMBY: Protecting Green Space with Green Money

15. The Price of Harmony

16. The Table of Otherhood and Communion

17. The Community Club and Its Dissidents

18. American Pastoral and Revolutions of the Word

Epilogue: "The Great New Jersey Novel": American Pastoral and the Garden State of Letters

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-9788-3805-0

OCLC:

1435931328