My book, Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction, is out with Johns Hopkins University Press. OK, it’s been out since October, but still. I’m really excited about it.

Below is the description from JHUP’s site, and I have a related post, “5 Things You Might Not Know About Fifties Fiction,” on their blog as well. In brief, the book is about how one set of literary and cultural forms displaces another, especially as that process played out in the United States after World War II. Want to know why fifties fiction is full of rambling allegories and why no one writes like Jack Kerouac? Or what those facts have to do with the French Revolution or the invention of quantum mechanics? You’ve come to the right place.

There’s a preview of the book available via Google. Should you be so inclined, you can buy the thing directly from the press, via Amazon, or wherever fine literary-critical monographs are sold. Want to review it? The press has your hook-up.

Here’s a fuller description of project:

Socially, politically, and artistically, the 1950s make up an odd interlude between the first half of the twentieth century — still tied to the problems and orders of the Victorian era and Gilded Age — and the pervasive transformations of the later sixties. In Revolution, Matthew Wilkens argues that postwar fiction functions as a fascinating model of revolutionary change. Uniting literary criticism, cultural analysis, political theory, and science studies, Revolution reimagines the years after World War II as at once distinct from the decades surrounding them and part of a larger-scale series of rare, revolutionary moments stretching across centuries.

Focusing on the odd mix of allegory, encyclopedism, and failure that characterizes fifties fiction, Wilkens examines a range of literature written during similar times of crisis, in the process engaging theoretical perspectives from Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson to Bruno Latour and Alain Badiou alongside readings of major novels by Ralph Ellison, William Gaddis, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, and others.

Revolution links the forces that shaped postwar fiction to the dynamics of revolutionary events in other eras and social domains. Like physicists at the turn of the twentieth century or the French peasantry of 1789, midcentury writers confronted a world that did not fit their existing models. Pressed to adapt but lacking any obvious alternative, their work became sprawling and figurative, accumulating unrelated details and reusing older forms to ambiguous new ends. While the imperatives of the postmodern eventually gave order to this chaos, Wilkens explains that the same forces are again at work in today’s fracturing literary market.

As I say, I’m super happy to have the book out in the world. I owe thanks to many, many people for their help along the way. Now, on to the next one!