Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First CenturyAmerican Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century

Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what is emerging as perhaps the theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape - from the present, from history, from the existential - at a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, and at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decades—Chabon, Díaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among others—and finds that it always involves the contemporary utopian freedom or messianic salvation of childhood. He also places this American view of escape in relation to the oeuvres of world novelists David Grossman and Arundhati Roy, for whom experience always precedes the innocence that American authors strive to isolate, defend, usurp, and mobilize for their own projects. Radical escape, in the form of utopianism and messianism, as well as historical escape, most often from slavery or Nazism, haunts and provides the narrative impetus for the novels Limon examines, but always delivers characters to the inescapable globalism of the present and cannot save them from what they take to be the closing of the world frontier. Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape - from the commodified present, from directionless history, from moral death - at a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decades - Chabon, Diaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among others - and finds that it always involves the faux utopian freedom and pseudo-messianic salvation of childhood. When contemporary novelists feature actual historical escape, pervasively from slavery or Nazism, it appears in their novels as escape envy or escape nostalgia - as if globalization like slavery or Nazism could be escaped in a direction, from this place to another. Thus the closing of the world frontier inspires a mirror messianism and utopianism that in US novels can only be rendered as a performative, momentary, chiasmic relationship between precocious kids and their ludic guardians. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction Part I: Escape, Escapism, Escapology Chapter 1: Notes from Neverland Chapter 2: I Flit, I Float, I Fleetly Flee, I Fly Part II: Family Likenesses Chapter 3: The Escapist Chapter 4: Mellon Chapter 5: Bath and Bathos Chapter 6: The Beauty! The Horror! Chapter 7: Et in Nobis Arcadia Chapter 8: The Ethics of Immortality Chapter 9: The Songs of Murdered Souls Part III: Foreign Correspondents Chapter 10: Choice and the Chosen Chapter 11: Categorical Denial Part IV: Prequel Chapter 12: The Tunnel Out Acknowledgments References Index "In a major contribution to American studies, John Limon identifies and explores the central theme of American fiction of the first two decades of the 21st century: escapism"-- Provided by publisher