Road-book America
Subtitle: contemporary culture and the new picaresque
By: Rowland A. Sherrill.
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Urbana
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
Subjects: American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Picaresque literature, American -- History and criticism; American prose literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Travelers' writings, American -- History and criticism; Travelers -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Travel writing -- History -- 20th century; Travelers in literature; Travel in literature; United States -- Civilization -- 1945-
Description: "Road-Book America discloses how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of new American texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that decisively share the characterizing form.

Sherrill's discussion encompasses hundreds of American narratives published in the past four decades, including such examples of the genre as William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, and E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate.

Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, traveling characters common to both old and new versions, Sherrill shows how the "new American picaresque" transforms the satirical aims of the original into an effort to map and catalog the immensity and variety of America."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-340) and index.