The Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900-1960 / Tamlyn Avery.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Avery, Tamlyn, 1895-1999, author.

Series:

Modern American literature and the new twentieth century.

Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language maintenance.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 262 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh, Scotland : Edinburgh University Press Ltd, [2023]

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

Why did the Bildungsroman, defined as the novel of development, and its protagonist Youth, become the symbolic form of the US's cultural preoccupation with regional difference amidst the nation's rapid but uneven development c. 1900-1960? As a genre that historically represented the young individual's development in national-historical time, the Bildungsroman became one crucial means of configuring the culturally, politically, and economically asymmetrical effects of national modernization and the US's political ascendence within the capitalist world-system. Responding to that predicament, the novel of uneven development rose to salience, led by its protagonist, the unfixed youth, whose development within the national-historical time of Americanization is unsettled by their preoccupation with regional difference: an immobilizing entanglement I call American literature's regional complex. This book maps four prominent variations across the Midwest, Northeast, South, and Southwest that responded to that uneven development, fragmenting, and ultimately denying the Bildungsroman's consolidation into a coherent nationalist form.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION The U.S. Bildungsroman's Regional Complex

Part I Midwestern Naturalism

CHAPTER 1 Industrial Folklore and the Regional Ingénue in Dreiser and Sinclair

CHAPTER 2 Developing the Countryside: Cather, Hughes, and the Poetics of Rurality

CHAPTER 3 South Side's Overdevelopment: Farrell and Wright's Extreme Youths

Part II The Northeast's Young Aesthetes

CHAPTER 4 Emplacing Modernism: The Fitzgeralds and the Artist's Regional Complex

CHAPTER 5 Thurman and Fauset's Portraits of Harlem's Regional Artist

Part III Southern Underdevelopment

CHAPTER 6 Imagining The Region of Underdevelopment

CHAPTER 7 The Way of the World: Hurston's Folkloric Bildungsroman

CHAPTER 8 Caught and Loose: McCullers, O'Connor, and the Gothic Bildungsroman

Part IV Southwest Frontiers

CHAPTER 9 Mathews at the Limits of the Bildungsroman's National Framework

AFTERWORD Situating the Bildungsroman's Transnational Afterlives

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 20 Oct 2023).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Avery, Tamlyn. Regional development of the American bildungsroman, 1900-1960.

ISBN:

1-4744-8999-0

1-4744-8998-2

OCLC:

1374541028