| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines the ways in which post-World War II American literature written by white men responded to the Civil Rights and Feminist movements that called for equality during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the United States. I argue that these movements led to a crisis of white male identity, as white men saw their privileged position within American society being questioned. I chart this crisis of white masculinity in the fiction of three white male American novelists: John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Contrary to what current scholarship on these authors has proposed, I suggest that their novels, while purportedly espousing the ideals of the above movements, in truth defend and reinscribe white masculinity through a variety of ways. In Chapter 1, I argue that Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971), Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) and Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) ostensibly show support for the African American cause but upon closer inspection re-establish white privilege and restore the destabilised societal position of white Americans in the context of Civil Rights by merging white identity with that of African Americans. In Chapter 2, focusing on Updike’s Rabbit Redux, Bellow’s Herzog (1964), and Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995), I argue that these novels caricature second-wave feminism as a way of reinstating the social hierarchies that placed men at the top of American society. In Chapter 3, I propose that Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), Roth’s American Pastoral, and Bellow’s Herzog turn to religious morality in order to revitalise the privileged position of white masculinity. Reading these novels in this manner, I show how they associate white masculinity with moral goodness in order to pull it out of its postwar crisis. | en_GB |
