Carte publicată sub sigla Editurii Eikon. / Book published under the Eikon publishing house name.

Appearing at a crucial moment in the postwar period, the Beat Generation disrupted the conformist scene of the 1950s by proposing a counterculture characterised mostly by rejection of consumer culture and rebellion against status quo. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, among others, professed a marginal, eccentric stance, opposing an alternate aesthetics and a fresh literary idiom to the elitist modernist formalism.

Cristina Felea contends that the “traditional” interpretation of Beat literature needs to be reconsidered from the larger perspective of postmodernism and cultural studies. Her comprehensive and contextualised presentation of an intricate cultural phenomenon demonstrates that the Beat writers may be relocated as precursors of literary postmodernism and illustrates it with the fascinating case of Jack Kerouac.

This is an important contribution to the study of a group of artists and writers with a lasting impact on American and worldwide culture. (Virgil Stanciu)

Cristina Felea, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has translated major American authors (Henry Miller, Peter Beagle, Jack Kerouac) for important Romanian publishing houses.