Abstract
![CDATA[The Sot-Weed Factor is widely considered the first and greatest postmodern novel. In a satirical romp through America’s colonial history, John Barth charted new directions for the contemporary novel by returning to the eighteenth-century novel and its model, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615). Barth’s self-conscious play with genre expectations; deconstruction of binary certainties such as truth/fiction, history/myth, civilized/savage; and demonstration of the agency of narrative art furnished postmodern fiction with its model. The misadventures of Ebenezer Cooke, twin sister Anna, manservant Bertrand Burton, and mercurial tutor Henry Burlingame represent the fullest statement of Barth’s poetics, which aims to secure the liberal middle ground of American political life by rewriting the frontier myth of settler democracy.]]
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context |
| Editors | Linda De Roche |
| Place of Publication | U.S. |
| Publisher | ABC-CLIO |
| Pages | 1104-1106 |
| Number of pages | 3 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781440853593 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781440853586 |
| Publication status | Published - 2021 |