American Literature and Culture, 1900 - 1960

This introduction to American literature and culture from 1900 to 1960 is organized around four major ideas about America: that is it "big", "new", "rich", and "free".

• Illustrates the artistic and social climate in the USA during this period.
• Juxtaposes discussion of history, popular culture, literature and other art forms in ways that foster discussion, questioning, and continued study.
• An appendix lists relevant primary and secondary works, including websites.
• An ideal supplement to primary texts taught in American literature courses.

List of Illustrations vii

Timeline viii

Acknowledgments xxii

Introduction 1

1 Big 6

Expansion and its Discontents 12

The City 19

Representing Nature 36

Apocalypse 43

The Sense of Place 48

2 Rich 60

Weber and Veblen: Reasons to Work and Reasons to Spend 66

USA 71

Work and Identity 79

Labor Reform 91

Consumption and Identity 99

3 New 110

Beginning Anew: Crevecoeur and Hawthorne 115

Young America 119

Making It New I: Literary Modernism 128

Making It New II: The Other Arts 149

4 Free 165

The Multiple Meanings of Freedom 170

War and the Affirmation of American Values 173

Writing War 180

Upstream Against the Mainstream 187

“An Inescapable Network of Mutuality” 203

Notes 211

Websites for Further Study of American Literature and Culture 215

Bibliography 217

Index 231

"To call this an 'introduction' or 'guide' to its topic is accurate but modest...McDonald does not attempt to redefine texts so much as portray their coincidental nature...Highly Recommended." Choice Gail McDonald is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Learning to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (1993). She is also a Founder and Past President of the Modernist Studies Association. Say “America” and certain adjectives come readily to mind. Because of the nation’s wealth, energy, and global presence during the twentieth century, almost everyone has a view of America. This introduction to American literature and culture addresses four common conceptions of the United States: that it is “big,” “rich,” “new,” and “free.” Designed to illustrate the artistic and social climate in the USA from 1900 to 1960, the book discusses a range of artistic and cultural productions from the period that reinforce, revise, dispute, or deny these commonly held views of the country.

Each of the book’s four sections begins with a series of quotations from literary and other sources of the period, selected to emphasize a range of ideas about America. Within each section, history, popular culture, literature, and other art forms are then juxtaposed in a way that fosters discussion, questioning, and continued study. An appendix to the volume includes a list of primary works for further reading and a selective bibliography of secondary works on American literature and culture, including relevant websites. The book also features a timeline of the chief events -- political, social, and artistic.