Anti-humanism In The Counterculture by Guy Stevenson, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary Counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression, Romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas - ideas that doubted the perfectibility of self and species, that spurned the majority in favour of a spiritually enlightened minority, and that had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of talismanic figures in the Counterculture - the sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed 'philosopher of hip' Norman Mailer - the book explores a series of paradoxes at its centre: between the optimistic aim for a Walt Whitman-like American Romantic revival and pessimistic modernist intuitions; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, it argues, are vital to an understanding of the cultural and political worlds these writers helped shape - in their time and our own. | Anti-humanism In The Counterculture by Guy Stevenson, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters