Hip Figures dramatically alters our understanding of the postwar American novel by showing how it mobilized fantasies of black style on behalf of the Democratic Party. Fascinated by jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, novelists such as Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, John Updike, and Joan Didion turned to hip culture to negotiate the voter realignments then reshaping national politics. Figuratively transporting white professionals and managers into the skins of African Americans, these novelists and many others insisted on their own importance to the ambitions of a party dependent on coalition-building but not fully committed to integration. Arbiters of hip for readers who weren't, they effectively branded and marketed the liberalism of their moment—and ours.
Price: $35.00
Pages: 336
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Series: Post*45
Publication Date:
20 June 2012
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780804776356
Format: Paperback
"Hip Figures provides a stunning evaluation of the connection between popular liberal authors of the post-war period and the import of the 'hipster' aesthetic to the re-branding of the Democratic Party's ideological platform leading up the presidential election of John F. Kennedy and into the late twentieth century . . . Grounding each chapter in nuanced and moving close readings of various novels, Szalay traces the connections between novelistic liberalism and the Democratic politicians and rhetoric operating around the time of the novels' publication . . . In sum, Hip Figures is a powerful work of literary criticism and history that calls readers to evaluate the ways in which fictional texts of the post-war period reflect and inform the Democratic Party's stylish rhetoric of interracial coalition that ultimately supports the aims of a professional managerial class."
Michael Szalay is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of New Deal Modernism (2000).
