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From the Publisher
"Melting-Pot Modernism is an intelligent and beautifully written examination of the 'melting pot' as taken up in the work of four modernist writers. For Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein, questions of novelty and difference familiar to the immigration, assimilation, and nativist debates were likewise aesthetic concerns for problems of form, the self, and one’s relation to the past and to others. Sarah Wilson’s readings of individual texts are ingenious and illuminating; her argument is fruitfully grounded in solid historical understanding of the authors’ lives and of contemporaneous debates on immigration."—Christopher Douglas, University of Victoria, author of A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism
"Melting-Pot Modernism persuasively links early modernist experimentation to a specific social context: the discussions and political programs addressing questions of assimilation at the turn of the twentieth century. Wilson integrates into her discussion of 'melting-pot discourse' a wide array of texts—from immigrant autobiographies and sociological studies to the New History movement—that illuminate the themes and formal innovations of literary works by Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein."—Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania
"Sarah Wilson reopens the debate surrounding the efficacy of the melting-pot metaphor, tracing its influence from the discourses of Progressive-era America to the innovative exchanges of literary modernism. . . . Melting-Pot Modernism persuasively traces the durability of this self-consciously literary discourse and demonstrates the importance of close reading to the historical study of acculturation and diversity."—Alicia Rix, Times Literary Supplement (5 August 2011)
"Drawing on Progressive thinkers such as John Dewey, Robert E. Park, and Jane Addams, this adroit book develops a sociological lens through which the reader can view modernist literary experiments as reflecting dramatic cultural shifts."—Choice
Overview
Between 1891 and 1920 more than 18 million immigrants entered the United States. While many Americans responded to this influx by proposing immigration restriction or large-scale "Americanization" campaigns, a few others, figures such as Jane Addams and John Dewey, adopted the image of the melting pot to oppose such measures. These Progressives imagined assimilation as a multidirectional process, in which both native-born and immigrants contributed their cultural gifts to a ...