"Anathema to the spirit the Beats are remembered for": A Review of Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture

Abstract: Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture is a major new reappraisal of the Beat authors: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Mailer. Stevenson critiques the myth that would have us regard these writers as utopic dreamers or as well-meaning disciples of liberation who drew inspiration primarily from the Romantics and American Trascendentalists. While acknowledging these influences, Stevenson demonstrates the Beats were also inheritors of a deeply skeptical, often fatalist and misanthropic "anti-humanist" lineage in modern writing with major European exemplars. Stevenson's account provides a complex and thoroughgoing critique of the Beats' often paradoxical relationship to the counterculture, then and now.