Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a fresh reading of the later career development of one of America’s most celebrated authors. Through a contextual analysis of a select number of texts, this innovative study discusses how famed novels such as American Pastoral and The Plot against America demonstrate Philip Roth’s considerable interest in mapping, by means of his unique literary talent, the changing shape and fortunes of American liberalism since the 1930s. By viewing these novels and other seminal works of his later period through a wider historical lens, this book informs readers of the myriad ways in which Roth’s major phase of writing since the mid-1990s has shown considerable concern with questions of class, ethnicity, race, gender, and literary culture, all of which have been key components in the shifting intellectual and political makeup of American liberal ideology from the New Deal to our present time. This book goes beyond a mere historical analysis by taking a new look at how Roth’s experimentations in narrative style and his appeal to ahistorical notions of literary tradition rest in complex alignment with his fictional treatment of aspects of American history. This novel work of criticism demonstrates a heightened awareness of Roth’s career-length fascination with the formal characteristics of fiction, making clear to its audience that any reductively linear reading of Roth as a political novelist should be avoided at all costs. Ultimately, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a stimulatingly intelligent approach to the art of one of America’s true literary titans, providing the focused reader with a nuanced understanding of how Roth’s fiction has been shaped by the various competing strains in his dual roles as a disinterested formalist aesthete, on the one hand, and as a politically engaged author on the other.

"Students of Philip Roth’s writings will value this full-length study by Connolly (Hostos Community College, CUNY) along with A Political Companion to Philip Roth, ed. by Claudia Franziska Brühwiler and Lee Trepanier (CH, Jan'18, 55-1662), in which Connolly has an essay on Roth’s novel The Human Stain. (That essay focuses on the American "underclass"; in the present volume, the chapter devoted to The Human Stain focuses on race and ethnicity). Here Connolly concentrates on five Roth novels, departing from while acknowledging the formalist preoccupations by New Criticism interpreters. Indeed, the oscillations of Roth’s character Zuckerman across the novels reveals Roth’s tensions—tensions over aesthetic responsibility to the imagination and social engagement—anticipating and accompanying the cultural wars of post-1960s social movements and the anxieties tempering Roth’s Jewish consciousness. The egalitarianism Roth’s father hoped would result from the New Deal heavily influenced his author son, and Connolly examines the impact on Roth and his critics of Lionel Trilling, Arthur Schlesinger, LBJ’s Great Society programs, and the reactions of neoconservatives to the world Zuckerman inhabits. This sound critique is prodigiously referenced. . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - CHOICE

"Connolly is a brilliant guide through the many. . . aspects of Roth’s later fiction that make him such a compelling author, particularly to those interested in American politics and history. That specific readership will find in Connolly’s book a captivating analysis of the complex relationship between Roth’s artistic, political, and historical viewpoints, forcing the reader to reconsider his or her way of engaging with the worlds of Zuckerman." - VoegelinView