Society, Antisociality, and Postwar America

Is there such a thing as society? Was the mid-twentieth century an antisocial moment in U.S. history? Theodore Martin describes what happened to the idea of society in the wake of the New Deal and World War II, and argues that sociopolitical changes fueled the emergence of a new kind of antisocial novel, examples of which include Richard Wright’s “The Outsider,” Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train,” and Jim Thompson’s “The Getaway.”

Kennan Ferguson, ed., The Big No University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present Columbia University Press, 2017

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