This book traces the developing view of the human conditions through the major works of these five writers. The method is inductive, and the works are seen as a record of human experience not as an illustration of philosophical theory. A final chapter places them in the larger perspective of traditional American fiction. Originally published in 1967.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to...

This astute guide to the literary achievements of American novelists in the twentieth century places their work in its historical context and offers detailed analyses of landmark novels based on a clearly laid out set of tools for analyzing narrative form. • Includes a valuable overview of twentieth-and early twenty-first century American literary history • Provides analyses of numerous core texts including The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The...

Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels-Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock-that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from British Romantic poetry and translates...

Reading Sideways explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality in works of modern American literature. It tracks the crosswise circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in the aesthetic turn of these works was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience but also an engagement with political arguments and debates about available...

Discusses how theories of queer performativity, as articulated within the US Academy, are unable to capture the whole of Latino American queer subjectivity and experience. The Avowal of Difference explores the potentialities and limitations that queer theory offers in the context of Latino American texts and subjects. Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui contrasts Latino American sexual genealogies with the Anglo-European "coming out" narrative-and interrogates...

In the early nineteenth century, the southern poor white had a reputation for comic vulgarity and absurd violence; postbellum writers saw him as a quaint peasant; the 1920s transformed him into a revolutionary proletarian. Of the literary treatments discussed, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath emerges as a skillful compromise of documentary accuracy and political daring by reviving the tradition of degeneracy.

Demonstrates how written and visual representations worked to construct definitions of ethnicity in midcentury America. Fifties Ethnicities brings together a variety of texts to explore what it meant to be American in the middle of "America's Century." In a series of comparative readings that draws on novels, television programs, movie magazines, and films, Tracy Floreani crosses generic boundaries to show how literature and mass media worked to...

Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed "slums" or "blighted" to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private...

This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from...

Andrew Hoberek is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. In The Twilight of the Middle Class, Andrew Hoberek challenges the commonly held notion that post-World War II American fiction eschewed the economic for the psychological or the spiritual. Reading works by Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and others, he shows how both the form and content of...