A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900 - 1950

John T. Matthews

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118492086, 9780631206873
• eBook ISBN: 9781118661635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Economic History of the United States 1900–1950
• 2 The Changing Status of Women 1900–1950
• 3 The Status of African Americans 1900–1950
• 4 Pragmatism, Power, and the Politics of Aesthetic Experience
• 5 Class and Sex in American Fiction: From Casual Laborers to Accidental Desires
• 6 Jazz: From the Gutter to the Mainstream
• 7 French Visual Humanisms and the American Style
• 8 Early Literary Modernism
• 9 Naturalism: Turn-of-the-Century Modernism
• 10 Money and Things: Capitalist Realism, Anxiety, and Social Critique in Works by Hemingway, Wharton, and Fitzgerald
• 11 Chronic Modernism
• 12 New Regionalisms: Literature and Uneven Development
• 13 “The Possibilities of Hard-Won Land”: Midwestern Modernism and the Novel
• 14 Writing the Modern South
• 15 What Was High About Modernism? The American Novel and Modernity
• 16 African-American Modernisms
• 17 Ethnic Modernism
• 18 The Proletarian Novel
• 19 Revolutionary Sentiments: Modern American Domestic Fiction and the Rise of the Welfare State
• 20 Lesbian Fiction 1900–1950
• 21 The Gay Novel in the United States 1900–1950
• 22 The Popular Western
• 23 Twentieth-Century American Crime and Detective Fiction
• 24 What Price Hollywood? Modern American Writers and the Movies
• 25 The Belated Tradition of Asian-American Modernism
• 26 Modernism and Protopostmodernism
• 27 The Modern Novel in a New World Context
• 28 Reheated Figures: Five Ways of Looking at Leftovers
• Index