World War One, American Literature, and the Federal State

Description

In this book, Mark Whalan argues that World War One's major impact on US culture was not the experience of combat trauma, but rather the effects of the expanded federal state bequeathed by US mobilization. Writers bristled at the state's new intrusions and coercions, but were also intrigued by its creation of new social ties and political identities. This excitement informed early American modernism, whose literary experiments often engaged the political innovations of the Progressive state at war. Writers such as Wallace Stevens, John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, Zane Grey, and Edith Wharton were fascinated by wartime discussions over the nature of US citizenship, and also crafted new forms of writing that could represent a state now so complex it seemed to defy representation at all. And many looked to ordinary activities transformed by the war - such as sending mail, receiving healthcare, or driving a car - to explore the state's everyday presence in American lives.

Mark Whalan is Robert and Eve Horn Professor of English at the University of Oregon. His previous books include American Culture in the 1910s (2010), The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (2008), and Race, Manhood and Modernism in America: The Short Story Cycles of Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer (2007). He has published in American Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, the Journal of American Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and African American Review, and is co-editor, with Martin Halliwell, of the Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century series.

'In this readable, well-theorized critical study Whalan (Univ. of Oregon) examines how modernist literature charts the rise of a true deep state, one pervasive and totalizing, with a federal budget in 1916 of just $0.75 billion that three years later exploded to $19 billion. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.' B. Adler, Choice 'Whalan's well-researched and wide-ranging study is a valuable contribution to revisionary modernist studies.' John Carlos Rowe, American Literary History