Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community Narratives of Salvation [Hardcover]

Despite the success and significance of Jonathan Franzen's fiction, his work has received relatively little scholarly attention. Aiming to fill this conspicuous gap,Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Communityanalyzes each of Franzen's five novels in chronological order to reveal an interior logic animating his work.

Integrating various formal and ideological perspectives to illuminate Franzen's work, Jes?s Blanco Hidalga demonstrates that the concepts of salvation and redemption, typical of romance narratives, run throughout Franzen's fiction. Even as he re-assesses and expands the familiar interpretations of Franzen's work, Blanco Hidalga shows how these salvation narratives are used for self-legitimization not only by the characters, but by the writer himself. Combining critical rigor with interpretative boldness,Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Communityoffers a new theoretical approach to a major contemporary author.

An important contribution to the scholarship developing around Jonathan Franzens work. Blanco-Hidalga offers an intriguing and persuasive argument using a model of the conversion/redemption narrative to explain not only the paths Franzens characters take, but also his own, self-dramatized writing career. Complicating and opening up our understanding of Franzens work, Blanco Hidalga liberates it from the box some criticsand even Franzen himselfhave constructed around it. -Robert L. McLaughlin, Professor of English, Illinois State University, USA

Patiently engaging the entirety of Franzens growing corpus of major novels,Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Communityoffers a much-needed contribution to the reading of this major novelist. Analytically incisive, interpretively nuanced, Blanco Hidalgas timely monograph demands the attention of all sl&