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.
*Dissent*
A crisply intelligent and very readable study of irony’s literary
trajectory.
*Literary Hub*
Excellent, well-read and well-written…[An] insightful, provocative
and necessary book in literary studies.
*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.
*Times Literary Supplement*
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