American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920

Description

American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920 offers provocative new readings of authors whose innovations are recognized as inaugurating Modernism in US letters, including Robert Frost, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Gathering the voices of both new and established scholars, the volume also reflects the diversity and contradictions of US literature of the 1910s. 'Literature' itself is construed variously, leading to explorations of jazz, the movies, and political writing as well as little magazines, lantern slides, and sports reportage. One section of thematic essays cuts across genre boundaries. Another section oriented to formats drills deeply into the workings of specific media, genres, or forms. Essays on institutions conclude the collection, although a critical mass of contributors throughout explore long-term literary and cultural trends - where political repression, race prejudice, war, and counterrevolution are no less prominent than experimentation, progress, and egalitarianism.

Mark W. Van Wienen is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He has published extensively on American literature and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including essays appearing in American Literature, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Modern Fiction Studies. His previous books are Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge, 1997), Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War (editor, 2002), and American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois (2012).