This thoughtful and elegant study helps to illuminate not only the contradictory melancholia and mourning at the heart of John Irving’s fiction, but also reaches out to trace its contours in terms of a wider American cultural history. The author moves between theoretical sophistication and close critical reading with accomplished ease, and her interpretations of postmodernism, the sixties, Freud, Lacan ... Read moreand the Law of the Father, are never less than imaginative, original, and insightful. A major contribution to the study of American literature.
Dr. Alan Bilton, Swansea University, UK, author of An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (2002) Underlying Dr. Belgaid's compelling analysis in this book is a series of theoretical issues about the nature of cultural mourning and the loss of the ideal self-image in John Irving's narrative discourse. With her remarkable close reading of Irving's different novels, published in different phases of his life, Dr. Belgaid clarifies her theoretical issues in a fascinating manner that will surely attract not only Irving's readers but any reader who loves logical reasoning and convincing argument. Her feminist perspective, her acute awareness of the validity of other interpretations of Irving's work, combined with her extraordinary versatility in American literature, have qualified this book for academia as well.
Dr. Said Mentak, University Mohammed I, Oujda, Morocco Bouchra Belgaid's John Irving and Cultural Mourning is a thorough reassessment of Irving's oeuvre that simultaneously offers a radical interpretation of Postmodern American cultural mourning. Belgaid argues that Irving's problematic Postmodernism derives from the political failure of the sixties that engendered a cultural mourning that the novelist can only resolve through nostalgic re-assertion of the Law of the Father, a lost American ideal self image that unifies the fragmented Postmodern self of his central male protagonists.
Lucy Melbourne, Saint Augustine's College Show Less