David Simmons

‘Hundred-per-Cent American Con Man’: Character in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Though Christopher Gair points out in The American Counterculture (2007); that ‘oddly … recent studies of 1960s counterculture have largely erased literature from its history/ (142) Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) has proved to be something of an exception to this rule. Indeed, the last few years have seen the publication of what amounts to a groundswell of academic work concerning Kesey’s novel. The current resurgence of attention that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has attracted is perhaps a result of a concurrent re-ignition of interest in the immediate post-war period and its literature, brought about by the gradual erosion of the established critical hegemonies of postmodernism and post-structuralism. As these categories have been challenged, especially in an Anglo-American context, the desire to fill the interpretative void left behind has led a range of academics to reassess Kesey’s novel, offering a more comprehensive positioning, which contextualises the text as a significant, socially informed, literary object. It is noticeable that an increasing amount of recent criticism on the novel speaks to a wider understanding of an American canon in which texts exist as human and cultural artefacts.

Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon

The twentieth-century novel can now be considered to form a distinct and popular area of study. This edited collection brings together experts in the field of twentieth-century writing to provide a volume that is both comprehensive and innovative in its discussion of a set of newly canonical texts. From turn of the century texts such as Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899), through the work of acclaimed authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, and right up to more contemporary examples including Hanif Kureishis The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smiths White Teeth (2000) this volume provides a lively yet informed re-evaluation of some of the twentieth-centurys most significant and enduring literature. The emphasis in the collection is on a synthesis of original and established approaches to the texts, making the book particularly useful to newcomers to the field. The book employs a theoretically and philosophically informed approach but its style and language make it accessible to a wide audience.