Il s'agit d'abord de placer l'œuvre de Hubert Selby Jr dans le canon littéraire, mais pour s'échapper ensuite de la notion de canon, notamment réaliste, et envisager le style propre à l'auteur dans ses relations à d'autres auteurs qui l'ont précédé dans l'exploration de l'existence humaine. Au terme de la première partie, la dimension réaliste et tragique du travail de Selby sera plus spécifiquement étudiée par le biais de son personnage Harry, et de sa relation aux autres personnages l'œuvre. Enfin, aboutissant à l'idée d'Avatar cosmique et "d'Archi-Harry", la fin de cette étude ira jusqu'à explorer la dimension mythique de l'écriture, quand la mise en scène d'une tragédie, ouvre sur la foi dans l'existence. / The goal of this study is to situate Hubert Selby Jr.'s work in the literary canon, to eschew the very notion of "canon", and show how Selby's style belongs with the styles of those who transcend the literary tradition of "realism". Secondly, we will look at his characters, and define what makes them avatars of the same transcendental personality. In the end, the "tragic realism" of Selby will be described as a new version of an old myth.

A recurrent premise of post-war criticism is that World War II marked the end of the American working class novel. This thesis challenges this assumption and argues that the working class novel redeveloped throughout the 1940s and 1950s in response to major social, political, economic and cultural changes in the United States. A prime justification for the obituary on the working class novel was that after 1945 the United States no longer had class divisions. However, as the first two chapters of this study point out, such a view was promulgated by influential literary critics and social scientists who, as former Marxists, were keen to distance themselves from class politics. Insisting that the working class novel was hamstrung by a dogmatic Marxist politics and a fealty to social realism, these critics argued that the genre's relevance depended on the outdated politics and conditions of the 1930s. As such they were able to use literary criticism as a means of justifying their own ambiguous politics and deflecting any close scrutiny of their accommodation with the post-war liberal consensus. In a close examination of four writers in the subsequent chapters it is shown that, in fact, working class writers were extremely successful in adapting to post-war conditions. Harvey Swados, in his novel On the Line (1957) and in his journalism, provides crucial insights into the effects of the transition from a Fordist to a post-industrial society on the identity of the industrial worker. In The Dollmaker (1954) Harriette Arnow dramatises an important migration from the rural South to Detroit during World War II which exposes the ways in which American capitalism was able to diffuse a national working class identity. Chester Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and his experiences as an African American writer in the 1940s, highlight the intersections between race (and racism) and class in the United States. Hubert Selby, in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), undermines the hegemonic ideology of post-war consumerism by drawing attention to the poverty and violence in an urban working class community. All these writers share a common concern with continuing, and re-developing, the dynamic and heterogeneous tradition of American working class cultural production.