This cutting-edge Companion is a comprehensive resource for the study of the modern American novel. Published at a time when literary modernism is being thoroughly reassessed, it reflects current investigations into the origins and character of the movement as a whole.Brings together 28 original essays from leading scholarsAllows readers to orient individual works and authors in their principal cultural and social contextsContributes to efforts to recover minority voices, such as those of African American novelists, and popular subgenres, such as detective fictionDirects students to major relevant scholarship for further inquirySuggests the many ways that modern, American and fiction carry new meanings in the twenty-first century

John T. Matthews is Professor of English and American Studies at Boston University. His publications includeWilliam Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); "The Sound and the Fury": Faulkner and the Lost Cause (1990);The Play of Faulkner's Language (1982); and numerous articles and chapters on Faulkner, including recent essays inLook Away! The U.S. South and New World Studies (2004) andAmerican Literary History (2004). He is currently working on a study of the problem of the South in the modern American imagination. Matthews was a founding coeditor ofThe Faulkner Journal and serves on editorial boards for the New Southern Studies Series,Arizona Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, andThe Mississippi Quarterly.

Notes on Contributors viii

List of Figures xiii

Preface xiv

Acknowledgments 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

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

26 Modernism and Protopostmodernism 518Patrick O'Donnell

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