A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900 – 1950

This cutting–edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel 1900–1950. 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. The Companion allows students to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contexts. Contributions treat major directions in fiction, such as regionalism and the proletarian movement, for example, as well as the related practices of individual novelists; complementary essays address pertinent cultural, social, economic, and political contexts. Other pieces contribute to efforts to recover minority voices, including those of African–American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fiction. Each essay is accompanied by a short bibliography directing students to major relevant scholarship for further inquiry. Taken as a whole, the volume suggests the many ways that "modern," "American," and "the novel" carry new meanings going into the twenty–first century.

Notes on Contributors viii List of Figures xiii Preface xiv Acknowledgments xxiii 1 An Economic History of the United States 1900–1950 1 Eric Rauchway 2 The Changing Status of Women 1900–1950 13 Nancy Woloch 3 The Status of African Americans 1900–1950 31 Matthew Pratt Guterl 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 Delia Konzett 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

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 .