What's your road, man?
Subtitle: critical essays on Jack Kerouac's On the road
By: edited by Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton.
Contributors: Holladay, Hilary.; Holton, Robert, 1950-
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Carbondale
Language: eng
Number of pages: 214
ISBN-13: 9780809328833
Subjects: Kerouac, Jack, -- 1922-1969; Autobiographical fiction, American -- History and criticism; Beat generation in literature
Description: "The ten essays in this groundbreaking compilation cover a broad range of topics, employing a variety of approaches, including theoretical interpretations and textual and comparative analysis, to investigate such issues as race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the novel's historical and literary contexts. What's Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" illustrates the richness of the critical work currently being undertaken on this vital American narrative.

Combining essays from renowned Kerouac experts and emerging scholars, What's Your Road, Man? draws on an enormous amount of research into the literary, social, cultural, biographical, and historical contexts of Kerouac's canonical novel. Since its publication in 1957, On the Road has remained in print and has continued to be one of the most widely read twentieth-century American novels.

Several essays enhance understanding of the book by comparing it with alternative versions of the text, like the original 1951 scroll manuscript and some of Kerouac's other novels, and with works by Kerouac's contemporaries such as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Further studies explore ethnicity, identity, and the novel's place in American literature as well as its relevance to twenty-first century readers.

On the Road has inspired readers for more than fifty years, and the new research included in What's Your Road, Man? introduces fresh perspectives on this classic work of American literature. Editors Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton have successfully woven little-known material with new understandings of familiar topics that will enlighten current and future generations of Kerouac enthusiasts and scholars for years to come."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Revisions of Kerouac: the long, strange trip of the On the road typescripts / Matt Theado; title: Free ways and straight roads: the interstates of Sal Paradise and 1950s America / Lars Erik Larson; title: The tenement castle: Kerouac's lumpen-bohemia / Robert Holton; title: 'Adventures in auto-eroticism': economies of traveling masculinity in On the road and the first third / Mary Paniccia Carden; title: Parallel destinies in The bell jar and On the road / Hilary Holladay; title: 'Dedicated to America, whatever that is': Kerouac's versions of On the road / R. J. Ellis; title: When Mexico looks like Mexico: the hyperrealization of race and the pursuit of the authentic / Rachel Ligairi; title: The makings of paradise / Michael Skau; title: Typetalking: voice and performance in On the road / Tim Hunt; title: Can On the road go on the screen? / Regina Weinreich.