Modern American Literature

An incisive study of modern American literature, casting new light on its origins and themes. Exploring canonical American writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner alongside less familiar writers like Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell, the guide takes readers though a diverse literary landscape. It considers how the rise of the American metropolis contributed to the growth of American modernism; and also examines the ways in which regional writers responded to an accelerated American modernity. Taking in African American modernism, cultural and geographical exile, as well as developments in modern American drama, the guide introduces readers to current critical trends in modernist studies.

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

Here is a classic collection from one of America’s greatest authors. Though these short stories have universal appeal, they are intensely local in setting. With the exception of “Turn About,” which derives from the time of the First World War, all these tales unfold in a small town in Mississippi, William Faulkner’s birthplace and lifelong home. Some stories—such as “A Rose for Emily,” “The Hound,” and “That Evening Sun”—are famous, displaying an uncanny blend of the homely and the horrifying. But others, though less well known, are equally colorful and characteristic. The gently nostalgic “Delta Autumn” provides a striking contrast to “Dry September” and “Barn Burning,” which are intensely dramatic. As the editor, Saxe Commins, states in his illuminating Foreword: “These eight stories reflect the deep love and loathing, the tenderness and contempt, the identification and repudiation William Faulkner has felt for the traditions and the way of life of his own portion of the world.”

Shows how shifting views on race caused the American conservative movement to surrender highbrow fiction to to progressive liberals.

Original essays by twelve distinguished international scholars offer critical overviews of the major genres, literary culture, and social contexts that define the current state of scholarship. This Companion also features a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. The introductory reference guide concludes with a current bibliography of further reading organized by chapter topics.

Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.

This Very Short Introduction chronicles the trends and traditions of modern Latin American literature, arguing that Latin American literature developed as a continent-wide phenomenon, not just an assemblage of national literatures, in moments of political crisis. With the Spanish American War came Modernismo, the end of World War I and the Mexican Revolution produced the avant-garde, and the Cuban Revolution sparked a movement in the novel that came to be known as the Boom. Within this narrative, the author covers all of the major writers of Latin American literature, from Andr?s Bello and Jos? Mar?a de Heredia, through Borges and Garc?a M?rquez, to Fernando Vallejo and Roberto Bola?o.

Modern Minority presents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature's relationship to the genre of realism, particularly through its preoccupation with everyday life.