Philip Roth through the Lens of Kepesh

About

The Kepesh trilogy spans three decades of Philip Roth’s career, beginning with The Breast in 1972, and continuing with the Professor of Desire in 1977 and The Dying Animal in 2001. The trilogy has received limited attention to date, despite the fact that the character of Kepesh is as close to Roth himself, as his more obvious authorial surrogates like Nathan Zuckerman, and ‘Philip Roth.’ This study demonstrates that the trilogy is not only worthy of critical analysis in its own right, but also that an appreciation of its themes and strategies deepens our understanding of his entire fictional enterprise, offering an invaluable perspective on one of the world’s most important novelists.

Authors

Paul McDonald is Senior Lecturer in American Literature, and Course Leader for Creative Writing. He is the author of fifteen books including poetry, fiction, and criticism. Among his other HEB titles are, Laughing at the Darkness (2010), The Philosophy of Humour (2012), and Reading Beloved (2014). He has a keen interest in ancient humour, and takes perverse pleasure in the fact that Googling ‘the oldest joke in the world’ generates several hundred pages with his name on.

Samantha Roden is a Lead Practitioner for English at North East Wolverhampton Academy. She writes educational resources, digital pedagogical guides and conducts national webinars for Cambridge University Press. Her research interests include teaching writing through drama, and she has conducted workshops on this topic in numerous contexts, including the University of Wolverhampton.  Her poetry has appeared in several journals and her first full collection, Catch Ourselves in Glass, is forthcoming.