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

Hutner, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807832278 ISBN 13: 9780807832271

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009

Synopsis

This title discusses reviving forgotten twentieth-century novels.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 America's confrontation with modernity.Hutner explains that realist novels were frequently lauded when they first appeared. They are almost completely unread today, he contends, largely because they record the middle-class encounter with modern life. This middle-class realism, Hutner shows, reveals a surprising engagement with the social issues that most fully challenged contemporary readers in the United States, including race relations, politics, immigration, and sexuality. 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 novels of our own era will be remembered.

About this title

About the Author

Gordon Hutner is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and founding editor of the journal American Literary History.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807832278
• ISBN 13: 9780807832271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464