Giles Goat-Boy - Hardcover

Barth, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436033704 ISBN 13: 9780436033704

Publisher: Secker & Warburg, 1967

Synopsis

Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is the 4th novel by American writer John Barth. It's metafictional comic novel in which the world is portrayed as a university campus in an elaborate allegory of the Cold War. Its title character is a human boy raised as a goat, who comes to believe he is the Grand Tutor, the predicted Messiah. The book was a surprise bestseller for the previously obscure Barth, & in the 1960s had a cult status. It marks Barth's leap into American postmodern Fabulism. In this outrageously farcical adventure, hero George Giles sets out to conquer the terrible Wescac computer system that threatens to destroy his community in this brilliant "fantasy of theology, sociology & sex"-- Time

About this title

Review

(in full Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus) Satiric allegorical novel by John Barth, published in 1966. The book is set in a vast university that is a symbol for the world. The novel's protagonist, Billy Bockfuss (also called George Giles, the goat-boy), was raised with herds of goats on a university farm after being found as a baby in the bowels of the giant West Campus Automatic Computer (WESCAC). The WESCAC plans to create a being called GILES (Grand-Tutorial Ideal, Laboratory Eugenical Specimen) that would possess superhuman abilities. Billy's foster father, who tends the herd, suspects Billy of being GILES but tries to groom him to be humanity's savior and to stop WESCAC's domination over humans. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Edition details

• Publisher: Secker & Warburg
• Publication date: 1967
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0436033704
• ISBN 13: 9780436033704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 744