This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.

"Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination" explores Kerouac's fiction, poetry, religious writing, private journals, and correspondence as literary texts revealing his aesthetic vision for American belle letters. The vision encompasses his fictional rewriting of his personal history, his life-long quest for spiritual enlightenment - both Christian and Buddhist - and his resolute belief in the blending of popular and academic cultural artifacts to create voices and forms that speak of and to a new age. The book features chapters on "Some of the Dharma," "Doctor Sax," "On the Road," "Desolation Angels," and "Mexico City Blues,"

This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.

Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination explores Kerouac's fiction, poetry, religious writing, private journals, and correspondence to reveal his aesthetic vision for American belle-lettres. The vision encompasses his fictional rewriting of his personal history, his life-long quest for spiritual enlightenment--both Christian and Buddhist--and his resolute belief in the blending of popular and academic cultural artifacts. The book features chapters on Some of the Dharma, Doctor Sax, On the Road, Desolation Angels, and Mexico City Blues and includes a discussion of Kerouac's influence on later writers, including Hunter Thompson and Bob Dylan.