A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900 - 1950

by John T. Matthews (Editor)

Overview

This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole.

• Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholars
• Allows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts
• Contributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction
• Directs students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry
• Suggests the many ways that “modern”, “American” and “fiction” carry new meanings in the twenty-first century

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631206873
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	04/20/2009
Series:	Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture , #151
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 9.80(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

John T. Matthews is Professor of English and American Studies at Boston University. His publications include William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); "The Sound and the Fury": Faulkner and the Lost Cause (1990); The Play of Faulkner's Language (1982); and numerous articles and chapters on Faulkner, including recent essays in Look Away! The U.S. South and New World Studies (2004) and American Literary History (2004). He is currently working on a study of the problem of the South in the modern American imagination. Matthews was a founding coeditor of The Faulkner Journal and serves on editorial boards for the New Southern Studies Series, Arizona Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and The Mississippi Quarterly.

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Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors viii 

List of Figures xiii 

Preface xiv 

Acknowledgments xxiii 

1 An Economic History of the United States 1900–1950 1 

EricRauchway 

2 The Changing Status of Women 1900–1950 13 

Nancy Woloch 

3 The Status of African Americans 1900–1950 31 

Matthew PrattGuterl 

4 Pragmatism, Power, and the Politics of Aesthetic Experience 56 

Jeanne Follansbee Quinn 

5 Class and Sex in American Fiction: From Casual Laborers to Accidental Desires 73 

Michael Trask 

6 Jazz: From the Gutter to the Mainstream 91 

Jeremy Yudkin 

7 French Visual Humanisms and the American Style 116 

Justus Nieland 

8 Early Literary Modernism 141 

Andrew Lawson 

9 Naturalism: Turn-of-the-Century Modernism 160 

Donna Campbell 

10 Money and Things: Capitalist Realism, Anxiety, and Social Critique in Works by Hemingway, Wharton, and Fitzgerald 181 

Richard Godden 

11 Chronic Modernism 202 

Leigh Anne Duck 

12 New Regionalisms: Literature and Uneven Development 218 

Hsuan L. Hsu 

13 “The Possibilities of Hard-Won Land”: Midwestern Modernism and the Novel 240 

Edward P.Comentale 

14 Writing the Modern South 266 

Susan V. Donaldson 

15 What Was High About Modernism? The American Novel and Modernity 282 

John T. Matthews 

16 African-American Modernisms 306 

Michelle Stephens 

17 Ethnic Modernism 324 

Rita Keresztesi 

18 The Proletarian Novel 353 

Barbara Foley 

19 Revolutionary Sentiments: Modern American Domestic Fiction and the Rise of the Welfare State 367 

Susan Edmunds 

20 Lesbian Fiction 1900–1950 392 

Heather Love 

21 The Gay Novel in the United States 1900–1950 414 

Christopher Looby 

22 The Popular Western 437 

William R. Handley 

23 Twentieth-Century American Crime and Detective Fiction 454 

Charles J. Rzepka 

24 What Price Hollywood? Modern American Writers and the Movies 466 

Mark Eaton 

25 The Belated Tradition of Asian-American Modernism 496 

DeliaKonzett 

26 Modernism and Protopostmodernism 518 

Patrick O’Donnell 

27 The Modern Novel in a New World Context 535 

George B. Handley 

28 Reheated Figures: Five Ways of Looking at Leftovers 554 

Jani Scandura 

Index 579

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A strong contribution to literature on modernist American studies, this marvelous collection offers a comprehensive overview of modern American fiction and its study, along with directions for new scholarship." (CHOICE, 2009)

Editorial Reviews

"A strong contribution to literature on modernist American studies, this marvelous collection offers a comprehensive overview of modern American fiction and its study, along with directions for new scholarship." (CHOICE, 2009)

From the Publisher