Twentieth Century American Fiction In Circulation

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation is a study of the twentieth-century linked story collection in the United States. It emphasizes how the fictional form grew out of an established publishing model—individual stories printed in magazines, revised and expanded into single-author volumes that resemble novels—which creates multiple contexts for the reception of this literature. By acknowledging the prior appearance of stories in periodicals, the book examines textual variants and the role of editorial emendation, drawing on archival records (drafts and correspondence) whenever possible. It also considers how the pages of magazines create a context for the reception of short stories that differs significantly from that of the single-author book. The chapters explore how short stories, appearing separately then linked together, excel at representing the discontinuity of modern American life; convey the multifaceted identity of a character across episodes; mimic the qualities of oral storytelling; and illustrate struggles of belonging within and across communities. The book explains the appearance and prevalence of these narrative strategies at particular cultural moments in the evolution of the American magazine, examining a range of periodicals such as The Masses, Saturday Evening Post, Partisan Review, Esquire, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The primary linked story collections studied are Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938), Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942), John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1988).

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.

Detailing the adventures of a supernatural clan of vampires, witches, and assorted monstrosities, Ray Bradbury’s Elliott family stories are a unique component of his extensive literary output. Written between 1946 and 1994, Bradbury eventually quilted the stories together into a novel, From the Dust Returned (2001), making it a creative project that spanned his adult life. Not only do the stories focus on a single familial unit, engaging with overlapping twentieth-century themes of family, identity and belonging, they were also unique in their time, interrogating post-war American ideologies of domestic unity while reinventing and softening gothic horror for the Baby Boomer generation. Centred around diverse interpretations of the Elliott Family stories, this collection of critical essays recovers the Elliotts for academic purposes by exploring how they form a collective gothic mythos while ranging across distinct themes. Essays included discuss the diverse ways in which the Elliott stories pose questions about difference and Otherness in America; engage with issues of gender, sexuality, and adolescence; and interrogate complex discourses surrounding history, identity, community, and the fantasy of family.

Modernist Literature and European Identity examines how European and non-European authors debated the idea of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It shifts the focus from European modernism to modernist Europe, and shows how the notion of Europe was constructed in a variety of modernist texts. Authors such as Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Aimé Césaire, and Nancy Cunard each developed their own notion of Europe. They engaged in transnational networks and experimented with new forms of writing, supporting or challenging a European ideal. Building on insights gained from global modernism and network theory, this book suggests that rather than defining Europe through a set of core principles, we may also regard it as an open or weak construct, a crossroads where different authors and views converged and collided.

This study explores the concept of Stimmung in literary and philosophical texts of the modern age. Signifying both 'mood' and 'attunement', Stimmung speaks to the categories of affective experience and aesthetic design alike. The study locates itself in the nexus between discourses on modernity, existentialism and aesthetics and uncovers the pivotal role of Stimmung in 19th- and 20th-century European narrative fiction and continental philosophy. The study first explores the philosophical and aesthetic origins and implications of Stimmung to, then, discuss its role in the narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. These readings demonstrate a significant shift towards an aesthetic of affective intensity and immediacy, in which the experience of the reading process takes centre stage as each author develops an aesthetic philosophy of Stimmung in their own right. Through its focus on the concept of Stimmung, the study thus unearths a fundamental link between existentialist concerns and narrative practice in modern literature.

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women’s magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book’s analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity’s broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines extends recent research into modernism’s circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women’s magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism’s public profile.

Queering Modernist Translation explores translations by Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and H.D. through the concept of queering translation. As Bancroft argues, queering translation is an intersectional lens for gleaning identity and socio-cultural issues in translation, such as gender, sexuality, diaspora, and race. Using theories espoused by Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Grosz, Sara Ahmed, and Rinaldo Walcott as foundations for his arguments, Bancroft demonstrates that queering translation offers more expansive ways of imagining the relationship between translation and the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them. Intervening in new Modernist studies and translation studies, Queering Modernist Translation furthers contemporary conversations regarding Modernism and its lasting importance in the twenty-first century.

Encompassing a broad definition of the topic, this Companion provides a survey of the literary magazine from its earliest days to the contemporary moment. It offers a comprehensive theorization of the literary magazine in the wake of developments in periodical studies in the last decade, bringing together a wide variety of approaches and concerns. With its distinctive chronological and geographical scope, this volume sheds new light on the possibilities and difficulties of the concept of the literary magazine, balancing a comprehensive overview of key themes and examples with greater attention to new approaches to magazine research. Divided into three main sections, this book offers: • Theory—it investigates definitions and limits of what a literary magazine is and what it does. • History and regionalism—a very broad historical and geographic sweep draws new connections and offers expanded definitions. • Case studies—these range from key modernist little magazines and the popular middlebrow to pulp fiction, comics, and digital ventures, widening the ambit of the literary magazine. The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine offers new and unforeseen cross-connections across the long history of literary periodicals, highlighting the ways in which it allows us to trace such ideas as the “literary” as well as notions of what magazines do in a culture.