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From Table of Contents:
◊ Beat, Beats, Beatness and Beatitude
◊ The Affluent 1950s: Consensus and Nascent Anxieties
◊ Allen Ginsberg: The Poet-Prophet of the Beat Generation
◊ Jack Kerouac: The Catholic Misfit and the Conservative Rebel
◊ William Burroughs: The Wizard of Words.
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The Pillars of the Beat Generation: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs analyses from an ideological and aesthetic perspective, the beginning, development and the evolution of the Beat Generation in the mid 20th century. The book discusses poems and prose texts authored by the best known writers of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. The purpose of the volume is to identify the strategies employed by the Beat Generation writes to subvert mainstream political values, conventional social expectations and traditional narrative strategies. The Beat Generation is construed as a heterogeneous group, a hybrid and dynamic entity, with mutable margins and centers, while the Beat text is described as an unstable discourse, whose strong subversive accents give sometimes way to ideological compromises. The books explores the way in which Beat poems, essays and confessional texts become strategies of resistance in a game with high political and spiritual stakes. Drawing on Emerson s ideal of the poet-prophet, on the surrealist strategy of confounding art with life and on the relativism of postmodernism at times, the Beats created a new crucible of American values, a new philosophy of rebellion and acceptance. Key figures in the cultural politics of the mid 20th century, the Beats ensured the transition from the postwar avant-garde to the youth counterculture of the 1960s.
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