Format:
xiv, 482 Seiten.
ISBN:
978-1-405-17046-8
Series Statement:
Wiley-Blackwell histories of American literature
Content:
"A look at the first five decades of 20th century American literature, covering a wide range of literary works, figures, and influences A History of American Literature 1900-1950 is a current and well-balanced account of the main literary figures, connections, and ideas that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. In this readable, highly informative book, the author explores significant developments in American drama, fiction, and poetry, and discusses how the literature of the period influenced, and was influenced by, cultural trends in both the United States and abroad. Considering works produced during America’s rise to prominence on the world stage from both regional and international perspectives, MacGowan provides readers with keen insights into the literature of the period in relation to America’s transition from an agrarian nation to an industrial power, the racial and economic discrimination of Black and Native American populations, the greater financial and social independence of women, the economic boom of the 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, the impact of world wars, massive immigration, political and ideological clashes, and more."
Content:
"For Henry Adams writing in The Education of Henry Adams (1918) his nineteenth century education had left him completely unprepared to understand the new century that he saw around him, and he feared that the impersonal technologies that characterized the new century would provide little inspiration for artists. The change would go on to be even greater than Adams had imagined. This volume of the Blackwell History of American Literature covers the period when the USA became an international power, at first regionally and then following the First Word War on the global stage. American literature explores the impact of this change upon questions of community, identity, and values from both regional and international perspectives. The early years of the 1900s saw the final works of Henry James and Mark Twain, both writers prefiguring in their own ways the challenge to comfortable certainties that would shortly come with modernism. The ways in which writers dramatized such change will be a major theme of the history. Wharton and Dreiser developed the strategies of realism and naturalism inherited from Crane and Norris. With the work of such figures as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Faulkner the acceptance of limitation, Anderson's "little things" in his Winesburg, Ohio, found formal parallels in the writers' challenges to the conventions of nineteenth century unities. Responding to the work of Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf among others, and the impact of Freud and new ideas in science, they looked for what still might be certain in a world of increasingly rapid change, and raised questions about what value or use any such limited certainties might have. Modernist experiment is much more muted in the work of Willa Cather, although the themes are similar, and are explored to different degrees by other writers too--the dangers of romanticizing the past, and the challenges of the transition from a pastoral, pioneer culture to an industrial one"--
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Online-Ausgabe, PDF ISBN 978-1-1191-0093-5
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Online-Ausgabe, EPUB ISBN 978-1-1190-7277-5
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Online-Ausgabe ISBN 978-1-1190-7278-2
Language:
English
Subjects:
American Studies
