A Cultural History of the American Novel, 1890–1940
Henry James to William Faulkner

This account of America reconstructs literary history as a cultural drama out of which novels and the events emerge as kindred forms of cultural expression.

David L. Minter (Author)

9780521467490, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 June 1996

296 pages
23 x 15.5 x 1.9 cm, 0.465 kg

"...A Cultural History of the American Novel approximates a luminous archaeology of the burgeoning modernist period, uncovering the spectral relations between culture, cultural production, and the socio-political pressures of the times....Given the wide range of such powerful insights and 'cultural readings,' Minter's book will undoubtedly prove valuable not only to scholars of American literary history but also to anyone interested in understanding the all too often invisible connections between cultural production, 'real' people and 'real issues'--such as racism, scientific/technological invention, discovery, ethnicity, borders, responsibility, freedom, World War. hope, assent and democracy." Carlton Smith, American Literature

This book interweaves a wide selection of the novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a series of cultural events ranging from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to the 'Southern Renaissance' of the 1930s. Minter examines a wide variety of period novels as works of art that arise from and that remain embedded in culture - arguing conversely, that cultural events such as the making of Chicago's Columbian Exposition and New York's Armory Show differ only in degree, not in kind, from novels. Minter thus constructs a broad and synthetic vision that portrays literary history as a cultural drama in which novels and events emerge as related sites of cultural expression. This book traces the history of African American theatre from its beginnings to the present. It analyses the types of plays written for this theatre, identifies the perennial problems faced by theatre artists and producing companies, and makes bold, innovative proposals for the theatre's healthy survival.

A preface in two parts
Acknowledgements
A note on sources, citations and bibliography
Part I. A Dream City, Lyric Years and a Great War: 1. The novel as ironic reflection
2. Confidence and uncertainty in The Portrait of a Lady
3. Lines of expansion
4. Four contemporaries and the closing of the West
5. Chicago's 'dream city'
6. Frederick Jackson Turner in the dream city
7. Henry Adam's Education and the grammar of progress
8. Jack London's career and popular discourse
9. Innocence and revolt in the 'lyric years': 1900–1916
10. The Armory show of 1913 and the decline of innocence
11. The play of hope and despair
12. The Great War and the fate of writing
Part II. Fiction in a Time of Plenty: 13. When the war was over: the return of detachment
14. The 'jazz age' and the 'lost generation' revisited
15. The perils of plenty, or how the twenties acquired a paranoid tilt
16. Disenchantment, flight and the rise of professionalism in an age of plenty
17. Class, power and violence in a new age
18. The fear of feminisation and the logic of modest ambition
19. Marginality and authority/race, gender and region
20. War as metaphor: the example of Ernest Hemingway
Part III. The Fate of Writing during the Great Depression: 21. The discovery of poverty and the return of commitment
22. The search for 'culture' as a form of commitment
23. Three responses: the examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes and John Dos Passos
24. Cowboys, detectives and other tough-guy antinomians: residual individualism and hedged commitments
25. The search for shared purpose: struggles on the Left
26. Documentary literature and the disarming of dissent
27. The Southern Renaissance: forms of reaction and innovation
28. History and novels/novels and history: the example of William Faulkner
Notes
Bibliographical notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]