A New Fiedler Reader [Paperback]

Leslie Fiedler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999

Leslie Fiedler's radical opinions and theories have changed the way we think about American literature and pop culture, challenging long-established schools and ushering in a genre of first-person, experience-based criticism. Praised and respected as "one of the most important figures in the history of American cultural thought in this century," Fiedler introduced groundbreaking ideas that now permeate university studies in literature: a homoerotic element in American machismo, interracial dependence as the classical American bond, those on the social margins being "secret selves," and the continuum of "high" and "low" culture.Designed to delight Fiedler's contemporary audience and introduce the author to a whole new generation of readers, "A New Fiedler Reader" is a captivating anthology of Fiedler's most notorious and celebrated essays, along with a selection of his engaging poems and short fiction. A literary icon, Fiedler is among those who urged legalisation of marijuana in the late '60s; suggested that college students read Timothy Leary along with Milton; and was accused of corrupting the young with dangerous leftist ideas. Collected are Fiedler's most widely known articles, from "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" to "An Almost Imaginary Interview: Hemingway in Ketchum". Complementing these essays are various lesser known poems and short stories, providing the reader with the complete Fiedler experience.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is marvelous writing." -- Liberty, July 2000

About the Author

Leslie Fiedler is the Distinguished Samuel Clemens Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, and an associate fellow of Calhoun College at Yale University. A recipient of the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, Fiedler has been a Fulbright scholar, a Guggenheim fellow, and a judge for the National Book Awards.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573927465
• ISBN-13: 978-1573927468
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,061,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars AVATAR OF AUDACITY, March 26, 2000

By 

Richard Kostelanetz (NEW YORK, NEW YORK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A New Fiedler Reader (Paperback)

Long one of the great independent American literary and cutlural critics, Leslie Fiedler has based his expository style on ironic audacity. In 1948, as a young academic, teaching in Missoula, Montana, he published an essay suggesting that a principal recurring myth of American literature was the interracial homoerotic romance, "as physical as a handshake," where white and colored males leave civilization for life together in open territory. Since his examples included such familiar characters as Huck and Jim, Queequg and Ahab, Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook , Fielder's thesis did not suffer from a lack of sort-of persuasive evidence. This essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" was included in An End of Innocence (1955), Fiedler's first collection, and has since been reprinted many times, sometimes with disclaimers. For good reason. Like all classic essays, it can be reread many times over for its subtleties and witty turns. And it opens this book, which is the second Fiedler Reader. The first appeared well over two decades ago. One problem with this new book, however, is that, given the invitation to produce a second selection from his work, if not a reinterpretation, Fiedler missed the opportunity, simply recycling the previous Reader book with the addition of a few more recent pieces, inevitably disappointing those of us who expected something more audacious, if not Fiedlerian. Nonetheless, even in these more recent writings are classic complicated sentences with a wealth of ideas amid elegrant, original phrasings. Consider this about gun control: "But anyone familiar with the long struggle of the rising bourgeoisie for equality, which climaxed in the French and American Revolutions, cannot doubt for a moment that this key passage in our Bill of Rights, like earlier revolutionary manifestoes, unequivocally demanded that along with such other privileges as the rights to vote and to learn to read, once reserved for the rling class, the formerly oppressed classes should be granted the right to carry guns, which, appropriately enough, to this very day are called in the vernacular, equalizers." From its opening declaration of a subject through its asides to its punchline, this is marvelous writing. I've always ranked Fieldler among the great American essayists in the late 20th Century, one of the few whose style can be compared with H. L. Mencken's; but, though he is essentially an essayist, his prose hasn't recently appeared often in American magazines, so many of them devoid of irony and other subtle humor, not to mention contributor independence. What A New Fieldler Reader suggests to me is a depressing thought--given current editorial limitations, he may well be the last of a kind.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dinosaurs at War and Peace, October 8, 2006

By 

T. Porges (Washington DC, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A New Fiedler Reader (Paperback)

Two,maybe three generations of academic blowhards have gone after Leslie Fiedler with whatever they had, and now as he sinks into the half-life of the sometimes quoted but almost never read, it looks like they've won. This is way too bad. The cartoon image of Fiedler was a trend-driven panderer, a French theorist whom you could read and understand if you cared to, which most didn't. He remains in my reading an orthodox critic who sensed a general impatience with his subject and tried to make it at least seem a bit more interesting. He's someone from another time, when Hipster academic culture was distinctly european,and when I for one was a hell of a lot less cynical than now. I'm hoping that there are readers out there whose experience of Fiedler will have nothing to do with the nostalgia that infects my own feelings for him: who will read him as something old-fashioned, maybe, but new to them, who will enjoy him now.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Clown Prince of American Letters, June 4, 2000

By 

Richard Stephenson "samms2" (Pottstown, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A New Fiedler Reader (Paperback)

In an irony Fiedler would understand [painful as it is], Fiedler helped make Saul Bellow and John Barth household names, championing their early works. No critics have championed Fiedler's fiction. Many have lauded his great books like Love and Death in the American Novel.

At least this new reader has Nude Croquet, a great novella. I wanted to make a movie of it; I still do. Fiedler once visited Carol O'Connor and mentioned my interest but nothing came of that contact.

Fiedler's best novel isn't even on amazon's list as "out of print". The Second Stone is a fine novel full of depth and humor; it takes place in Rome. Fiedler is fluent in Italian and taught in Italy on sabbatical years ago.

One reviewer on this site laments the fact that this book merely recycles old articles. Yes, I lament that as well. But Fiedler is older now and not in peak health.

With Edmund Wilson, he is one of American's best literary thinkers and, in The Second Stone and "Nude Croquet", one of its best writers as well.