Philip Roth, The Counterlife

David Rampton (University of Ottawa)

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Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1986

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

The Counterlife (1986) is Philip Roth’s thirteenth novel. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was rapidly recognized as one of Roth’s most significant achievements. In it, Roth explores all his favourite subjects – sex, love, emotional crises, social constraints, dreams of escape, Jewishness, and the idea of the self as a performance. The Counterlife is one of the Zuckerman novels: i.e., the novels in which Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, provides him with the means of re-imagining reality in ways that tease readers out of thought by conflating life and fiction. The book has also been characterized as Roth’s wholehearted embrace of postmodernism, but his interest in the sort of …

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2614 words

Citation: Rampton, David. "The Counterlife". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 September 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21004, accessed 06 April 2025.]