A Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900 - 1950

This Concise Companion offers an authoritative overview of American fiction from 1900-1950 focusing on the literature that developed out of the social, cultural, and political changes, which occurred in the first part of the 20th century. With careful reference to key authors and their works, newly-commissioned chapters examine the period's formative events, such as the Depression and the two World Wars, and their representation in literature. In addition, essays also analyze the multiple and paraadoxical self-descriptions that have been taken to define modernism, such as the 'rise of proletarian literature' and the 'high modernist' novel Looking at issues of race, language, cosmopolitanism, and the First and Second World Wars, this volume introduces the contextual information and strategic knowledge that students need to formulate their own readings of classic American fiction. Authors such as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, who have defined our understanding of modernism for so long, are reread in relation to key texts of the period by Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. This Companion examines the original context of these authors' works and looks at its current reception to uncover how 20th-century literature is being reinterpreted in the new millennium.

Peter Stoneley is a Professor of English in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He is author of Mark Twain And The Feminine Aesthetic (1992), Consumerism And American Girls' Literature, 1860-1940 (2003), and A Queer History Of The Ballet (2006).

Cindy Weinstein is Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology. She is author of Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004), The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (1995), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (2004).