The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 6, Prose Writing, 1910–1950

Cambridge University Press, 11/28/2002
EAN 9780521497312, ISBN10: 0521497310

Hardcover, 640 pages, 23.6 x 16.4 x 3.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction Sacvan Bercovitch and Jonathan Fortescue
I. A cultural history of the modern American novel David Minter
Prologue
Part I. A Dream City, Lyric Years, and a Great War
1. The novel as ironic reflection
2. Confidence and uncertainty in The Portrait of a Lady
3. Lines of expansion
4. Four contemporaries and closing of the west
5. Chicago's 'Dream City'
6. Frederick Jackson Turner in the dream city
7. Henry Adams's Education and the grammar of progress
8. Jack London's career and popular discourse
9. Innocence in the 'Lyric Years'
1900–1916
10. The Armory Show of 1913 and the decline of innocence
11. The play of hope and despair
Part II. Fiction in a Time of Plenty
12. When the war was over
the return of detachment
13. The 'Jazz Age' and the 'Lost Generation' revisited
14. The perils of plenty, or how the Twenties acquired a paranoid tilt
15. Disenchantment, flight, and the rise of professionalism in an age of plenty
16. Class, power, and violence in a new age
17. The fear of feminization and the logic of modest ambitions
18. Marginality and authority/race, gender and region
19. War as metaphor
the example of Ernest Hemingway
Part III. The Fate of Writing During the Great Depression
20. The discovery of poverty and the return of commitment
21. The search for 'culture' as a form of commitment
22. Three responses
the examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos
23. Cowboys, detectives and other tough-guy antinomians
residual individualism and hedged commitments
24. The search for shared purpose
struggles on the left
25. Documentary literature and the disarming of dissent
26. The southern renaissance
forms of reaction and innovation
27. History and novels/novels and history
the example of William Faulkner
II. Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance Rafia Zafar
1. A new Negro?
2. Black Manhattan
3. Avatars and Manifestos
4. At home and homeless in Harlem
5. New Negro, New Woman
6. Thurman and Nugent
7. Minor writers
8. Hurston and Wright
9. Black Modernism
III. Ethnic Modernism Werner Sollors
Introduction
1. Gertrude Stein and 'Negro Sunshine'
2. Ethnic lives and 'lifelets'
3. Ethnic themes, modern themes
4. Mary Antin
progressive optimism against odds
5. Who is 'American'?
6. American languages
7. 'All the past we leave behind'? Ole E. Rølvaag and the immigrant trilogy
8. Modernism, ethnic labeling
and the quest for wholeness
Jean Toomer's new American race
9. Freud, Marx, hard-boiled
10. Hemingway spoken here
11. Henry Roth
ethnicity, modernity, and modernism
12. The clock, the salesman and the beast
13. Was modernism anti-totalitarian
14. Facing the extreme
15. Grand central terminal.