Stamps or Stumps

                                                                     ——Metaphoric symbols in The Plot Against America
  Abstract: This essay argues that, Philip Roth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, conveyed the impact of “place”, “American Dream” and “Stump” through a series of metaphoric images — “stamp” on his characters in a best-selling fiction, The Plot Against America, in an immediate and compelling way. And these stamps contain profound meanings embodied with the subject or background of America in the 1940s. Therefore, the paper attempts to examine the ambience of Newark neighborhood and its relationships upon narrator’s identity, main characters feelings of belonging or alienation, and their ambivalence about whether to stay or leave in the novel through unearthing the novel’s many stamp images and its elevations, namely “local vistas”, “the American Dream” and “Stump” that create the seemingly contemporaneous alienation or dislocation that arises from the text.

  Keywords: Stamp; The Plot Against America; Philip Roth; the American Dream; Stump

  *Corresponding author, Li Wang: School of Foreign Languages, Nantong University, Nantong, China， E-mail: wanglily22@ntu.edu.cn

  Min Xie: School of Foreign Languages, Nantong University, Nantong, China, E-mail: 806310744@qq.com