Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s
- Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s
Many writers germane to this chapter are subjects of only a single article or book this year, although a few saw an increase in scholarship. Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O’Connor are especially popular, with three books and a number of individual essays devoted to each. James Baldwin and Erskine Caldwell receive essay collections, and Richard Wright and Vladimir Nabokov are the focus of a dozen items each. In contrast to 2005 there are no substantial biographies, and less scholarship appears on Easterners and Westerners. The popular topics, however, remain the same; gender, race, class, and religion continue to inspire critical debate.
i Proletarians
a. John Steinbeck and Others
Mimi R. Gladstein, “Bilingual Wordplay: Variations on a Theme by Hemingway and Steinbeck” (HN 26, i: 81–95), studies the bilingual elements in fiction by these two writers, whose wordplay and humor help to bridge gaps between the English and Spanish cultures and to provide “a privileged perspective on the text[s]” for bilingual students. In “On the Wire with Death and Desire: The Telephone and Lovers’ Discourse in the Short Stories of Dorothy Parker” (ArQ 62, iv: 47–70) April Middeljans examines four telephone stories by Parker: “A Telephone Call,” “Dusk Before Fireworks,” “New York to Detroit,” and “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl.” In these works Parker uses the telephone to denote “the locus of a power struggle between [End Page 311] heterosexual lovers,” a struggle that women typically lose because their “attempt to subvert the masculine hegemony in telephone discourse—or in the love affair—is futile.” An interesting bit of personal information about Parker is supplied by Marion Meade in “Estate of Mind” (BookForum 13, i: 8–11). Meade discusses the tumultuous friendship between Parker and Lillian Hellman that led to Parker’s ashes being stored in Hellman’s attorney’s office for years. Parker’s remains went unburied for over two decades before finally being interred in an NAACP memorial garden in Baltimore.
Elizabeth Hardwick comments on Mary McCarthy, her friendships, her memoir, and her writing in “Elizabeth Hardwick on Mary McCarthy,” pp. 207–18 in Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, eds., The Company They Kept. In “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy” (AmLH 18: 86–101) Deborah Nelson explores “Arendt’s political philosophy of common sense” and “McCarthy’s aesthetic of the fact” in order to consider why these two writers “believed reality had to be faced in a condition of exposure and how this could be achieved.”
In “Material Resistance and the Agency of the Body in Ann Petry’s The Street” (AL 78: 89–116) William Scott asserts that The Street “should be read as a story not just about one woman’s subjugation and degradation by forces beyond her control but as a story about acts of material resistance.” Meg Wesling, “The Opacity of Everyday Life: Segregation and the Iconicity of Uplift in The Street” (AL 78: 117–40), examines Petry’s use of the figure of Benjamin Franklin in that novel. According to Wesling, in The Street Petry questions the traditional reading of Franklin’s Autobiography, making Lutie rather than Franklin the book’s archetypal figure and “undermin[ing] the idealization of individual mobility and uplift at its very core.” In “Buried Alive: Gothic Homelessness, Black Women’s Sexuality, and (Living) Death in Ann Petry’s The Street” (AAR 40: 439–60) Evie Shockley places The Street within the gothic tradition. The novel contains gothic conventions such as live burial, a doppelgänger, creatures of the living dead, homelessness, and silences that haunt, elements that link Petry to other African American writers, such as Richard Wright, Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison, who also utilize the gothic.
In “The Strength of the Midwestern Proletariat: Meridel Le Sueur and the Ideal Proletarian Literature” (Midamerica 31 [2004]: 80–90) Sara Kosiba considers Le Sueur’s belief that those working in the Midwest [End Page 312] were the most capable of creating a true Midwestern literature and culture, one that would center around proletarian concerns.
