The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 6

Prose Writing, 1910-1950

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Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published December 2002, 700 pages, cloth

ISBN 0521497310

Volume 6 in this series explores the emergence and flowering of modernism in the U.S. David Minter provides a cultural history of the American novel from World War I to the Great Depression, Rafia Zafar tells the story of the Harlem Renaissance and Werner Sollors examines canonical texts and original immigrant writing. These narratives cover the entire range of literary prose written in the first half of the twentieth century.

Contributors: Sacvan Bercovitch, Jonathan Fortescue, David Minter, Rafia Zafar, Werner Sollors

Contents

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 Īcultureā 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 ĪNegro Sunshineā; 2. Ethnic lives and Īlifeletsā; 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. Rælvaag 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.