A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900 - 1950

An authoritative guide to American literature, this Companion examines the experimental forms, socio-cultural changes, literary movements, and major authors of the early 20th century. This Companion provides authoritative and wide-ranging guidance on early twentieth-century American fiction.

• Considers commonly studied authors such as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, alongside key texts of the period by Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska
• Examines how the works of these diverse writers have been interpreted in their own day and how current readings have expanded our understanding of their cultural and literary significance
• Covers a broad range of topics, including the First and Second World Wars, literary language differences, author celebrity, the urban landscape, modernism, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, regionalism, and African-American fiction
• Gives students the contextual information necessary for formulating their own critiques of classic American fiction

Notes on Contributors vii

Chronology xi

Acknowledgments xviii

Introduction 1

1 Turning the Century 17
Michael A. Elliott and Jennifer A. Hughes

2 Women and Modernity 37
Jennifer L. Fleissner

3 Queer Modernity and Lesbian Representation 57
Kathryn R. Kent

4 Markets and “Gatekeepers” 77
Loren Glass

5 Manhood, Modernity, and Crime Fiction 94
David Schmid

6 American Sentences: Terms, Topics, and Techniques in Stylistic Analysis 113
Paul Simpson and Donald E. Hardy

7 The Great Gatsby as Mobilization Fiction: Rethinking Modernist Prose 132
Keith Gandal

8 Modernism’s History of the Dead 158
Michael Szalay

9 The Radical 1930s 186
Alan M. Wald

10 Racial Uplift and the Politics of African American Fiction 205
Gene Andrew Jarrett

11 The Modernism of Southern Literature 228
Florence Dore

12 Cosmopolis 253
Mary Esteve

13 Other Modernisms 275
John Carlos Rowe

Index 295

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).

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.