Reorienting the field of American literary modernism, Christopher Schedler defines an intercultural form of representation termed border modernism that challenges the aesthetic hegemony of metropolitan (high) modernism. In this dialogical study, Schedler compares the works of European and Anglo-American modernists (D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather) with the works of Mexican, Native American and Chicano writers (Mariano Azuela, John Joseph Mathews and Americo Paredes) who engaged with modernist theories and practices. In the process he uncovers a unique intercultural aesthetic...

This work examines eight Virginia novels against the background of the political and social concerns of the Jacksonian years in which they were written, arguing that the authors used familial processes as a metaphor to discuss issues that they regarded as critical. Each chapter focuses on a single novel - Swallow Barn, Kentuckian in New York, Cavaliers of Virginia, Horse-Shoe Robinson, George Balcombe, The Partisan Leader, and Knights of the Horseshoe - and examines its connections to the social and political tensions of the time of its publication - general progress, sectional unity,...

This is a study of the ways in which the cultural forces and discourses of gender inflect the practice and theory of three modernist British novelists, E.M. Forster, May Sinclair and D. H. Lawrence.

This work examines and challenges the traditional transatlantic axis, London-Paris-New York, that marks the intersection between western thinking about the City and the advent of literary modernism. Taking up the works of James Joyce and John Dos Passos, and drawing on a variety of interpretive strategies from literary criticism, social history, urban studies, sociology and cultural studies, Harding investigates the formation of a specifically Atlantic system of metropolitan identities and discourses.

Balancing the Books represents a sophisticated examination of the ongoing engagement of American literature with the economies of slavery through the works of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Both Faulkner and Morrison write about the relationship between race, identity, and history, and about how the legacies of slavery linger in the lives and actions of their characters, although the narrative strategies through which they render these themes ultimately diverge. Dussere brings considerations of debt and repayment, exchange and accounting, and capital and the market-concepts...

Beyond the Sound Barrier examines twentieth-century fictional representations of popular music-particularly jazz-in the fiction of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. Kristin K. Henson argues that an analysis of musical tropes in the work of these four authors suggests that cultural "mixing" constitutes one of the central preoccupations of modernist literature. Valuable for any reader interested in the intersections between American literature and the history of American popular music, Henson situates the literary use of popular music as a...

Figures of Finance Capitalism brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured, and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a patrician elite. This book illustrates the centrality of finance capitalism to the mid-Victorian middle-class social imagination by discussing a selection of major Victorian texts by Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray and Macaulay. In so doing, it draws on several new perspectives on British...

This work explores how the presence of African peoples has influenced the national and literary identity of American countries that have a significant black population, but do not imagine themselves primarily as black, such as the United States and Latin American nations such as Brazil, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. Tracing the differences and similarities between national literatures and the ways these nations define and stratify racial categorisations, the author shows how the literary imagination works to incorporate, reject and/or deny the numerically and culturally significant...

Death, Men and Modernism argues that the figure of the dead man becomes a locus of attention and a symptom of crisis in British writing of the early to mid-twentieth century. While Victorian writers used dying women to dramatize aesthetic, structural, and historical concerns, modernist novelists turned to the figure of the dying man to exemplify concerns about both masculinity and modernity. Along with their representations of death, these novelists developed new narrative techniques to make the trauma they depicted palpable. Contrary to modernist genealogies, the emergence of the...

This study examines the way that the modernization and incorporation of the American publishing industry in the early twentieth century both helped to foment the emerging late industrial cultural hierarchy and capitalized on that same hierarchy to increase readership and profits. More importantly, however, it attempts to trace the ways in which recently-introduced marketing techniques, reconceived ideas of audience, and new paradigms in author-publisher relations affected American writers of the 1930s and the literature they produced.Using case studies of authors chosen from various points on...