ABSTRACT

HYLAND has written an up-to-date and useful overview of the work of Saul Bellow, which can be recommended to students coming fresh to the work of the most important of American postwar novelists. Although essentially introductory, the volume has its own distinctive approach, arguing that Bellow’s work is marked by an intimate awareness of the intellectual currents of the time, and a persistent engagement with the movement of contemporary history. For Hyland it is Bellow’s eclecticism, the manner in which he draws on a wide range of cultural fields and traditions-not merely as an intellectual foundation for his fiction, but also as a means to examine the polyglot nature of modern American experience-that forms the basis of his popular appeal.