The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization

ISBN-13: 9780195338911 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 288 str.

Keith Gandal

Opis

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War. But was it warfare that drove them to write? Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These 'quintessential' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-a-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understanding of America's postwar literature.

Recenzje

The major point...is that Gandal is the first person to see the relevance of the experience of mobilization to American fiction and that he has - with great brilliance as well as originality - demonstrated exactly the kind of difference it made to some of the central texts of the 20s and beyond. I learned a great deal from this book, and I am confident that it will, when published, make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism. I recommend publication in the strongest possible terms.

O autorze

Keith Gandal is professor of English at Northern Illinois University outside of Chicago. He is the author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is also the author of a novel, Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.