The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

The Anti-Hero in the American Novel rereads major texts of the 1960s such as Catch-22, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and Slaughterhouse 5 to offer an innovative re-evaluation of a set of canonical novels that moves beyond entrenched post-modern and post-structural interpretations towards an appraisal which emphasizes the specifically humanist and idealist elements of these works, and in the process reasserts the important social impetus that lies behind them.