Road-book America

Description:

"Road-Book America discloses how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of new American texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that decisively share the characterizing form. Sherrill's discussion encompasses hundreds of American narratives published in the past four decades, including such examples of the genre as William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, and E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate. Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, traveling characters common to both old and new versions, Sherrill shows how the "new American picaresque" transforms the satirical aims of the original into an effort to map and catalog the immensity and variety of America."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Travelers in literature,  American prose literature,  History and criticism,  Travelers' writings, American,  Travel writing,  Civilization,  Travelers,  American fiction,  American Picaresque literature,  Travel in literature,  History,  American literature, history and criticism, 20th century,  Picaresque literature,  Popular culture, united states

Places: United States

Times: 1945-,  20th century