The Cambridge history of American literature. Volume 6, Prose writing, 1910-1950 / general editor, Sacvan Bercovitch.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bercovitch, Sacvan, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American prose literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American prose literature.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

United States--Literatures--History and criticism.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xx, 620 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Summary:

Volume 6 of The Cambridge History of American Literature explores the emergence and flowering of modernism in the United States. David Minter provides a cultural history of the American novel from the 'lyric years' to World War I, through post-World War I disillusionment, to the consolidation of the Left in response to the mire of the Great Depression. Rafia Zafar tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance, detailing the artistic accomplishments of such diverse figures as Zora Neal Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Richard Wright. Werner Sollors examines canonical texts as well as popular magazines and hitherto unknown immigrant writing from the period. Taken together these narratives cover the entire range of literary prose written in the first half of the twentieth century, offering a model of literary history for our times, focusing as they do on the intricate interplay between text and context.

Contents:

A Cultural History of the Modern American Novel: Introduction / David Minter

A Dream City, Lyric Years, and a Great War

The Novel as Ironic Reflection

Confidence and Uncertainty in The Portrait of A Lady

Lines of Expansion

Four Contemporaries and the Closing of the West

Chicago's "Dream City"

Frederick Jackson Turner in The Dream City

Henry Adams's Education and The Grammar of Progress

Jack London's Career and Popular Discourse

Innocence and Revolt in the "Lyric Years": 1900-1916

The Armory show of 1913 and the Decline of Innocence

The Play of Hope and Despair

The Great War and The Fate of Writing

Fiction in a Tme of Plenty

When the War Was Over: the Return of Detachment

The "Jazz Age" and the "Lost Generation" Revisited

The Perils of Plenty, or How The Twenties Acquired a Paranoid Tilt

Disenchantment, Flight, and The Rise of Professionalism in an Age of Plenty

Class, Power, and Violence in a New Age

The Fear of Feminization and The Logic of Modest Ambition

Marginality and Authority / Race, Gender, and Region

War as Metaphor: The Example of Ernest Hemingway

The Fate of Writing During the Great Depression

The Discovery of Poverty and the Return of Commitment

The Search for "Culture" as a Form of Commitment

Three Responses: The Examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos

Residual Individualism and Hedged Commitments

The Search for Shared Purpose: Struggles on the Left

Documentary Literature and The Disarming of Dissent

The Southern Renaissance: Forms of Reaction and Innovation

History and Novels / Novels and History: The Example of William Faulkner

Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance

A New Negro? / Rafia Zafar

Black Manhattan

Avatars and Manifestos

Harlem as A State of Mind: Hughes, McKay, Toomer

A New Negro, A New Woman: Larsen, Fauset, Bonner

"Dark

Skinned Selves Without Fear or Shame: Thurman and Nugent"

Genre in The Renaissance: Fisher, Schuyler, Cullen, White, Bontemps

Southern Daughter, Native Son: Hurston and Wright

Black Modernism

Ethnic Modernism

Introduction / Werner Sollors

Gertrude Stein and "Negro Sunshine"

Ethnic Lives and "Lifelets"

Ethnic Themes, Modern Themes

Mary Antin: Progressive Optimism against The Odds

Who is "American"?

American Languages

All the Past We Leave Behind? Ole E. Rölvaag and the Immigrant Trilogy

Modernism, Ethnic Labeling, and The Quest for Wholeness: Jean Toomer's New American Race

Freud, Marx, Hard-Boiled

Hemingway Spoken Here

Henry Roth: Ethnicity, Modernity, and Modernism

The Clock, The Salesman, and the Breast

Was Modernism Antitotalitarian?

Facing the Extreme

Grand Central Terminal.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 18 Nov 2015).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781139053594 (ebook)

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.