Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This Companion is designed to help readers make sense of the vast changes in US literature that took place during the period from 1900 to 1950. One need only look at some of the texts that fall under this temporal umbrella to realize that the literature at the turn of the century and the literature of the mid-century differ greatly, despite the obvious persistent examination of race, gender, and class relations. These essays offer a variety of explanations for a fifty-year period that includes texts as dissimilar as Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects Food Rooms (1914), Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (1932), and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). To be sure, there are many ways to explore the diversity of literary production during these years: the impact of new mechanisms in the marketplace, such as agents and editors, for the writing and distributing of texts; the influence of communism on authors in the thirties; World War I, World War II; the advent of New Criticism, academic professionalization, and the valorization of irony, ambiguity, and modernity. There is no master narrative that contains and explains the creative forces of this, let alone any, period's literary production. That is not to say, however, ... log in or subscribe to read full text