The return of the real in the works of Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, marked a turning point in his development as a writer. Formerly considering himself mainly influenced by postmodern literary traditions, he now also employs realist storytelling methods in his writing. This book is the first comprehensive study of Jonathan Franzen's works and of the change in his understanding of his role as a novelist. It offers analyses of Franzen's first two novels The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion and of his non-fiction. It focuses on Franzen's most influential and most popular work, The Corrections, and not only provides a detailed analysis of the novel itself, it also investigates the implications of Franzen's „reconstructionist“ turn towards traditional, „accessible“ narrative devices in the context of the emergence of a so-called post-postmodern literature.