A Concise Companion to American Fiction 1900 - 1950

by Stoneley, Peter; Weinstein, Cindy

• ISBN13: 9780470694107
• ISBN10: 0470694106
• Edition: 1st
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2008-03-10
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

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

Author Biography

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).

Table of Contents

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