ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the ways Anne Frank is represented in Philip Roth's fictions, focusing particularly on his novels The Ghost Writer (1979) and Exit Ghost (2007). It focuses on two works that invoke Frank in a single line, and it identifies a phenomenon the author calls 'the banality of Anne Frank'. The book focuses on the ways Frank is invoked in relation to a photograph in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and Elinor Lipman's The Inn at Lake Devine (1998). It argues that Susan Gubar's brief comments about identifications with Frank in Holocaust poetry constitute another example of the critical tendency to fail to examine representations of Frank with sufficient care. The book focuses on representations of Frank in the writings of Michelle Cliff.
