On the Avenue of the Mystery

This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945-65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985-2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novelsthemselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965-75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much as fifty years after the novels on which they are based, the films display significant revisions and omissions prompted by the historical and cultural changes of the intervening years. Whereas these changes are nowadays often interpreted in purely political terms, this book argues that the experience of mystery and its decline is central to the novels and films and is a key feature of the period of cultural transformation that they bookend. At once a work of literary criticism, film studies, and cultural history, this book has the potential to reach both an academic audience and the broader readership that has long existed for these novels as well as the even broader one interested in reappraising the period of the global counterculture-among the most important of the influences that have shaped the contemporary world. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Gary Hentzi is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He has a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. He is coeditor and coauthor of The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism and has published widely on eighteenth- and twentieth-century literature, criticism, and film.

1. After the Rebellion: The Postwar Counterculture and Its Legacy 2. The Sands of Abjection in The Sheltering Sky 3. The Ballad of the Sad Café and the Worldhood of the World 4. On the Road and the Varieties of Religious Experience 5. The Visionary Cinema of James Baldwin: Mystery and Contradiction in Go Tell It on the Mountain 6. Counterculture Revisited: Young Adam Fifty Years Later 7. The Gay Science of William Burroughs: Naked Lunch on Page and Screen 8. At Play in the Fields of the Lord and the Ethnographic Imagination 9. Mystery, Myth, and Ritual: The Aftermath of the Counterculture