Jesús Blanco Hidalga, Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation

Abstract

Jesús Blanco Hidalga contributes to the critical scholarship on Jonathan Franzen’s work by proposing the concepts of salvation and redemption. Examining Franzen’s fiction with this theoretical lens, Blanco Hidalga suggests a metanarrative quality that relates the characters in the novels to the author himself. By integrating “usually separated formal and ideological perspectives” (ix), Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation departs from established scholarly criticism, offering a fresh interpretive reading against which Franzen’s work can be approached and reconsidered.