Lee Konstantinou is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Cool Characters is a remarkably thorough work of literary
scholarship, most valuable for how it unravels the political
thinking of canonical American writers (Ralph Ellison, Norman
Mailer), as well as some celebrated contemporary writers. -- Maggie
Doherty * Dissent *
A crisply intelligent and very readable study of irony's literary
trajectory. -- Dustin Illingworth * Literary Hub *
Excellent, well-read and well-written...[An] insightful,
provocative and necessary book in literary studies. -- Robert
Eaglestone * Times Higher Education *
Cool Characters is a major work of criticism that promises
to transform the study of post-World War II American literature. It
will be of enormous interest to graduate students and professors in
the field, as well as to anyone interested in the state of
contemporary literature. -- Michael Clune, author of White
Out
Lee Konstantinou's Cool Characters is the best study of
post-1945 fiction that I have read since Mark McGurl's The
Program Era, and it will no doubt be as influential. -- Andrew
Hoberek, author of The Twilight of the Middle Class
Konstantinou tells the story of 'how postmodernism became
historical' with some of the verve of a novelist, but without
sacrificing any of the virtues we expect to find in the work of a
top-notch cultural critic. It is, in the most surprising way, a
character-driven story, and one that sets out to answer a key
question about our now routinely ironic culture: how might we take
it and ourselves seriously again? -- Mark McGurl, author of The
Program Era
An impressive breadth of scholarship...Each chapter offers new
insights...Each of the book's characterological types exemplifies a
style of engagement with political and economic realities by
approaching recent American fiction in such a novel way,
Konstantinou contributes not only to literary studies but to our
ongoing discussion of those realities as well. -- Benjamin Madden *
Times Literary Supplement *
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