Elaine B. Safer is Professor of English at the University of Delaware and the author of The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey.

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: "Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness"

2. From The Ghost Writer to The Counterlife: Comic Incongruity and the Road to Postmodernism

3. Operation Shylock: The Double, the Comic, and the Quest for Identity

4. Sabbath's Theater: Sabbath's Fear of Death¿Raunchy? Picaresque? Heroic?

5. American Pastoral: The Tragicomic Fall of Newark and the House of Levov

6. I Married a Communist: "A Grave Misfortune Replete with Farce"

7. The Human Stain: Comic Irony and the Lives of Coleman Silk

8. The Dying Animal: "Pleasure Is Our Subject"

9. The Plot Against America: Paranoia or Possibility?

10. Conclusion: "The Farcical Edge of Suffering"

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index