A C O M P A N I O N T O

THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL

19001950EDITED BY

J O H N T. M AT T H E W S

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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A Companion to the Modern American Novel 19001950

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fi elds of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the fi eld.

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A C O M P A N I O N T O

THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL

19001950EDITED BY

J O H N T. M AT T H E W S

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition fi rst published 2009 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwells publishing program has been merged with Wileys global Scientifi c, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to the modern American novel 19001950 / edited by John T. Matthews. p. cm. (Blackwell companions to literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-20687-3 (alk. paper) 1. American fi ction20th centuryHistory and criticismHandbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Modernism (Literature)United States. I. Matthews, John T. PS379.C63 2009 813'.5209dc22 2008036226

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in 11 on 13 pt Garamond 3 by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong KongPrinted in Singapore

1 2009

www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwelwww.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

Contents

Notes on Contributors viiiList of Figures xiiiPreface xivAcknowledgments xxiii

1 An Economic History of the United States 19001950 1Eric Rauchway

2 The Changing Status of Women 19001950 13Nancy Woloch

3 The Status of African Americans 19001950 31Matthew Pratt Guterl

4 Pragmatism, Power, and the Politics of Aesthetic Experience 56Jeanne Follansbee Quinn

5 Class and Sex in American Fiction: From Casual Laborers to Accidental Desires 73Michael Trask

6 Jazz: From the Gutter to the Mainstream 91Jeremy Yudkin

7 French Visual Humanisms and the American Style 116Justus Nieland

8 Early Literary Modernism 141Andrew Lawson

9 Naturalism: Turn-of-the-Century Modernism 160Donna Campbell

vi Contents

10 Money and Things: Capitalist Realism, Anxiety, and Social Critique in Works by Hemingway, Wharton, and Fitzgerald 181Richard Godden

11 Chronic Modernism 202Leigh Anne Duck

12 New Regionalisms: Literature and Uneven Development 218Hsuan L. Hsu

13 The Possibilities of Hard-Won Land: Midwestern Modernism and the Novel 240Edward P. Comentale

14 Writing the Modern South 266Susan V. Donaldson

15 What Was High About Modernism? The American Novel and Modernity 282John T. Matthews

16 African-American Modernisms 306Michelle Stephens

17 Ethnic Modernism 324Rita Keresztesi

18 The Proletarian Novel 353Barbara Foley

19 Revolutionary Sentiments: Modern American Domestic Fiction and the Rise of the Welfare State 367Susan Edmunds

20 Lesbian Fiction 19001950 392Heather Love

21 The Gay Novel in the United States 19001950 414Christopher Looby

22 The Popular Western 437William R. Handley

23 Twentieth-Century American Crime and Detective Fiction 454Charles J. Rzepka

24 What Price Hollywood? Modern American Writers and the Movies 466Mark Eaton

25 The Belated Tradition of Asian-American Modernism 496Delia Konzett

Contents vii

26 Modernism and Protopostmodernism 518Patrick ODonnell

27 The Modern Novel in a New World Context 535George B. Handley

28 Reheated Figures: Five Ways of Looking at Leftovers 554Jani Scandura

Index 579

Notes on Contributors

Donna Campbell is Professor of English at Washington State University. She has written Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 18801915 (1997), and has published widely in scholarly journals on American literature. She writes the annual Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s chapter for American Literary Scholar-ship. Her next book will be a study of women writers of naturalism.

Edward P. Comentale is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. His fi rst book was Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde, and he is now at work on a monograph treating modernism, regionalism, and popular music entitled The State Im In: Modernism and American Popular Music. Recent articles deal with the modernist Midwest, William Faulkner, country music, and the Coen brothers.

Susan V. Donaldson is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of English and American Studies at William and Mary College. She has written Compet-ing Voices: The American Novel, 18651914 (1998), and coedited, with Anne Goodwyn Jones, Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (1997). Current projects include books on the politics of storytelling in the US South and on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and the demise of Jim Crow.

Leigh Anne Duck teaches at the University of Memphis, where she is Associate Professor of English and an affi liate of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change and the Center for Research on Women. Her book, The Nations Region: South-ern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism, appeared in 2006, and she has begun a new cross-cultural project on literature of the US South and South Africa.

Mark Eaton specializes in American literature, African-American literature, American ethnic literature, postmodernism, and fi lm studies at Azusa Pacifi c University, where he Professor of English. He is coeditor, with Emily Griesinger, of a volume of essays called The Gift of Story: Narrating Hope in a Postmodern World

Notes on Contributors ix

(2006) and has published widely on American literature and culture in scholarly journals.

Susan Edmunds is the auth