Existential Suburbia: the Influence of Sartrean Existentialism on US Fiction of the Suburbs from the 1960S to the End of the Twentieth Century
Existential Suburbia: The influence of Sartrean existentialism on US fiction of the suburbs from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century by Peter Latham University College London A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Declaration I, Peter Latham, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signature……………...Peter Latham Date……………………26/08/16 2 Abstract American suburban fiction is often viewed as satirical social commentary, critiquing its affluent, dull, and conformist cultural environment. In this thesis, however, I argue that a significant strand of such fiction, published between the early 1960s and the beginning of the twenty-first century, was concerned with broader existential themes, and was strongly influenced by European existentialism, particularly by Sartre’s philosophy. While this influence is apparent in American urban fiction of the 1950s, for example in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953), it is far more fully developed, and ‘Americanized’, in the suburban fiction of the 1960s – in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (1961), and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1962), all of which, I argue, are fundamentally concerned with the notion of existential authenticity. I suggest that existentialist, and specifically Sartrean, themes are developed in subsequent fiction – from a concern
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