A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900 – 1950

This Concise Companion offers an authoritative overview of American fiction from 1900–1950, focusing on the literature that developed out of the social, cultural, and political changes which occurred in the first part of the twentieth century. With careful reference to key authors and their works, newly commissioned chapters examine the period’s formative events, such as the Depression and the two world wars, and their representation in literature. In addition, essays also analyze the multiple and paradoxical self–descriptions that have been taken to define modernism, such as the “rise of proletarian literature” and the “high modernist” novel. Looking at issues of race, language, cosmopolitanism, book production, and gender, this volume introduces the contextual information and strategic knowledge that students can use to formulate their own readings of classic American fiction. Authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, who have defined our understanding of modernism for so long, are reread in relation to key texts of the period by Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. This Concise Companion examines the original context of these authors’ works and looks at its current reception to uncover how twentieth–century literature is being reinterpreted in the new millennium.

Notes on Contributors. Chronology. Introduction: Peter Stoneley (University of Reading) and Cindy Weinstein (California Institute of Technology). 1. Turning the Century: Michael A. Elliott (Emory University) and Jennifer A. Hughes (Emory University). 2. Women and Modernity: Jennifer L. Fleissner (Indiana University–Bloomington). 3. Queer Modernity and Lesbian Representation: Kathryn R. Kent (Williams College). 4. Markets and “Gatekeepers”: Loren Glass (University of Iowa). 5. Manhood, Modernity, and Crime Fiction: 1900–50 000: David Schmid (University at Buffalo). 6. American Sentences: Terms, Topics, and Techniques in Stylistic Analysis: Paul Simpson (Queen’s University Belfast) and Donald E. Hardy (University of Nevada). 7. The Great Gatsby as Mobilization Fiction: Rethinking Modernist Prose: Keith Gandal (Northern Illinois University). 8. Modernism’s History of the Dead: Michael Szalay (University of California, Irvine). 9. The Radical 1930s: Alan M. Wald (University of Michigan). 10. Racial Uplift and the Politics of African American Fiction: Gene Andrew Jarrett (Boston University). 11. The Modernism of Southern Literature: Florence Dore (Kent State University). 12. Cosmopolis: Mary Esteve (Concordia University, Montreal). 13. Other Modernisms: John Carlos Rowe (University of Southern California). Index

Peter Stoneley is Professor of English in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He is author of Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic (1992), Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature, 1860–1940 (2003), and A Queer History of the Ballet (2006). Cindy Weinstein is Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology. She is author of Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth–Century American Literature (2004), The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth–Century American Fiction (1995), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (2004).