Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture

This book offers a radical new reading of the 1950s and 60s American literary counterculture. Associated nostalgically with freedom of expression,romanticism, humanist ideals and progressive politics, the period was steeped too in opposite ideas – ideas that doubted human perfectibility, spurned the majority for a spiritually elect few, and had their roots in earlier politically reactionary avant-gardes. Through case studies of iconic figures in the counterculture – the sexual revolutionary Henry Miller, Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and self-proclaimed ‘philosopher of hip’, Norman Mailer – Guy Stevenson explores a set of paradoxes at its center. Between a Walt Whitman-like optimism and pessimistic modernist intuitions; between brutal rhetoric and emancipatory desires; and between social egalitarianism and spiritual elitism. Such paradoxes, he argues, are vital to an understanding of the cultural and political worlds these writers helped shape – in their time and beyond.