Midcentury Minor Novel

Michael Kalisch is Lecturer in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction (2021) and editor of Benjamin Markovits: Critical Essays (2024).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction in a Minor Key‘A refusal to be great’: Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey and The Journey Abandoned and the minor novel of ideasBreaking into laughter: Anticommunism, late modernism, and Eleanor Clark’s The Bitter Box Changing form: Jean Stafford and the limits of New CriticismHerzog in Venice: Richard Stern’s Stitch and Jewish American literary historyA lost classic: John Williams’s Stoner and the ‘rediscovery’ of the midcentury minor novelCoda: Towards a Minor CriticismBibliography

This is literary history at its most vital. Conducting a ‘rescue mission’ for the forgotten ‘minor’ novels of mid-century America, Kalisch refocuses our understanding of the anxieties and achievements of the period more generally, and offers a welcome challenge to our own tendency ‘to ask too much of the novel’.