Robert T. Tally Jr. is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University, USA, where he teaches American and world literature.

• Preface; 1. A Postmodern Iconography; 2. Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan; 3. Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night; 4. Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; 5. Eternal Returns, or Tralfamadorean Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five; 6. Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions; 7. Imaginary Communities, or the Ends of the Political: Slapstick and Jailbird; 8. Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard; 9. Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galapagos; 10. Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake; Bibliography; Index.

Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel does much to reposition Vonnegut as a major American writer. By approaching Vonnegut’s oeuvre as an integrated postmodern iconography, a strategic project bridging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, Tally reveals Vonnegut to be a serious, deeply imaginative writer whose fictions intervene in major intellectual debates—political and theoretical—that continue to impact contemporary social developments.