MACMILLAN Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture

This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of icons in the counterculture – the controversial sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its centre: between romantic optimism and modernist pessimism; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, Stevenson argues, help explain the cultural and political worlds these writers shaped – in their time and beyond. Review “With a tight focus on the three major Beat writers, framed by Henry Miller before them and Norman Mailer after, Guy Stevenson advances a compelling case for rethinking the ideological centre-ground of literary counterculture. Rather than fudging the contradictions in their politics, his study dissects the universally presumed progressivism of the “Beat brand,” teasing out with deep insight the paradoxes in Ginsberg and Kerouac of combining Romantic and reactionary literary traditions. The satirical anti-humanist Burroughs, who explored the “submarine blackness” of his own misanthropy, emerges as the least hypocritical if also most shocking of them all, a writer who is, as Stevenson argues, as relevant to the culture wars of the 21st century as he was to the radical movements of the second half of the 20th.” (Professor Oliver Harris, President of the European Beat Studies Network. Author of William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination)  “Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture is an excellent, erudite, well-written and original book, a major intervention in discussions of late modernism, the Beat writers, and the reception of modern and contemporary literature and culture. Stevenson usefully pans out into discussions of modernism’s complex reception writ large and the Beats’ vexed relations with modernism during a period when it was being rapidly institutionalized, tamed, made academically respectable.” (Professor Aaron Jaffe, Frances Cushing Ervin Professor of American Literature, Florida State University. Author of Modernism and The Culture of Celebrity) From the Back Cover This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of iconic figures in the counterculture – the sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its center. Between a Walt Whitman-like optimism and pessimistic modernist intuitions; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, he argues, are vital to an understanding of the cultural and political worlds these writers helped shape – in their time and beyond. About the Author Guy Stevenson is a lecturer in literature at Goldsmiths and Queen Mary Colleges, University of London, UK and a recent postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Edinburgh, UK. He specialises in modernism and the 1960s cou