A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900 - 1950

An authoritative guide to American literature, this Companion examines the experimental forms, socio-cultural changes, literary movements, and major authors of the early 20th century. This Companion provides authoritative and wide-ranging guidance on early twentieth-century American fiction. Considers commonly studied authors such as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, alongside key texts of the period by Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska Examines how the works of these diverse writers have been interpreted in their own day and how current readings have expanded our understanding of their cultural and literary significance Covers a broad range of topics, including the First and Second World Wars, literary language differences, author celebrity, the urban landscape, modernism, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, regionalism, and African-American fiction Gives students the contextual information necessary for formulating their own critiques of classic American fiction

Notes on Contributors vii Chronology xi Acknowledgments xviii Introduction 1 1 Turning the Century 17 Michael A. Elliott and Jennifer A. Hughes 2 Women and Modernity 37 Jennifer L. Fleissner 3 Queer Modernity and Lesbian Representation 57 Kathryn R. Kent 4 Markets and “Gatekeepers” 77 Loren Glass 5 Manhood, Modernity, and Crime Fiction 94 David Schmid 6 American Sentences: Terms, Topics, and Techniques in Stylistic Analysis 113 Paul Simpson and Donald E. Hardy 7 The Great Gatsby as Mobilization Fiction: Rethinking Modernist Prose 132 Keith Gandal 8 Modernism’s History of the Dead 158 Michael Szalay 9 The Radical 1930s 186 Alan M. Wald 10 Racial Uplift and the Politics of African American Fiction 205 Gene Andrew Jarrett 11 The Modernism of Southern Literature 228 Florence Dore 12 Cosmopolis 253 Mary Esteve 13 Other Modernisms 275 John Carlos Rowe Index 295