Alan Gibbs is a Lecturer in American Literature at University College, Cork, Ireland. He earned his doctorate in American Literature from the University of Nottingham.
2008 0-7734-5101-3 This monograph employs a diverse range of theories in order to shed new light on Henry Roth, and challenge conventional readings of him merely in terms of his Jewishness and/or debt to Freud. Above all, this study proposes that the Mercy series is simultaneously marked by Roth’s conflicting drives to confess and to evade autobiographical facts. These competing urges shape the form of the series in its rhetorical strategies of repetition, evasion, and decentred narration.