In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor’s Column
  • Derek Parker Royal (bio)

This issue of Philip Roth Studies is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it demonstrates how vibrant and eclectic the state of current Roth scholarship actually is, its handling of primary works, its engagement with a variety of critical approaches, and its understanding of the contexts in which Philip Roth has written his fiction. Perhaps even more significantly, the various contributions in this issue represent the kind of scope and breadth that we strive to attain with the journal. Here you will find discussions of novels that get fairly regular treatment—e.g., American Pastoral (1997) and The Plot Against America (2004)—while at the same time there are studies that focus on texts that get less attention in the scholarship, such as the relatively recent The Humbling (2009) and Nemesis (2010), or revisit works that have by and large fallen out of favor with readers.

In fact, the current issue begins with an in-depth look at one of these neglected, or at least under-represented, Roth novels. Patrick Hayes starts from the commonly held proposition that Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) is Roth’s big transitional work, unanticipated by anything that had come before, and posits that Letting Go (1962) actually embodies much of the uncertainties and conflicts Roth may have been experiencing in the wake of Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959). Hayes argues that a closer reading of Roth’s first novel reveals a writer wrestling with the idea of “serious” literature and wanting to reinvent what that kind of fiction might be, in the process laying the groundwork for the figures of Alexander Portnoy, Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, and Nathan Zuckerman. This essay is followed by one of the four comparative studies composing this issue. In her contribution, Meg King examines the links between American Pastoral and David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), especially in relation to concepts of manhood, the erosion of paternal roles, its links to ethnic identity, and cultural debates over absent fathers. In doing so, she highlights the authors’ problematic handling of paternity as it relates to the changing cultural realities of their times.

Next, Joshua Kotzin looks at Roth’s oft-cited alternate history, The Plot Against America, and its use of stamp collecting as a controlling image. What makes his study unique is its close reading of the two commemorative stamps described in the novel. Kotzin is particularly interested in the stamp commemorating Charles Lindbergh’s famous flight and how both its content and its composition provide interpretive keys into Roth’s counterfactual text. This is followed by two other comparative studies, one that reads Roth alongside an artist who is often linked to the novelist, and another that places Roth’s [End Page 5] final work of fiction alongside an unlikely companion. Shaun Clarkson explores the ways that The Humbling and Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997) represent women, Jews, and the plights of the artist. In particular, he reads both the film and the novella as intertextual responses to their respective fellow creators—Harry Block as Philip Roth, and Simon Axler as Woody Allen—and the animosity embodied in these depictions. In his latest contribution to Philip Roth Studies, James Duban reads Nemesis in light of the “Leg and Arm” chapter of Moby-Dick (1851). He see Bucky Cantor’s ire of polio (and Bucky’s own unwitting hand in spreading the disease) in Ahabian terms, and the novella’s narrator, Arnold Mesnikoff, as a more reasonable foil. It is worth noting that this marks the fifth time that Duban has been published in this journal, an impressive feat that has no parallel.

The last two pieces further underscore the diversity found in this issue. Lily Corwin reads Exit Ghost (2007), specifically Zuckerman’s meeting with Amy Bellette, as a representation of America’s, as well as its literary community’s, evolving relationship with the Holocaust. And in his brief survey, David J. Zucker teases out the links between Sabbath’s Theater (1995) and Salman Rushdie’s 2001 novel, Fury, especially as they relate to the protagonists’ personal and professional struggles. The issue concludes with the annual bibliography...

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