What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 - Softcover

Hutner, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807832278 ISBN 13: 9780807832271

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press, 2009

Synopsis

Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. Gordon Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In presenting literary history this way, Hutner argues, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have--and, Hutner suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.

About this title

Book Description:

"In restoring to view the middle-class novels that chronicled Americans' multifaceted responses to modernity, Hutner is a master chronicler himself. His reclamation project--astutely directed at both criticism and fiction--enables us to recover a more accurate and a more democratic literary history than we have previously possessed."--Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester, author of Songs of Ourselves: American Readers and the Uses of Verse

From the Inside Flap:

Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In presenting literary history this way, Hutner argues, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0807832278
• ISBN 13: 9780807832271
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464