Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Scholarly publications on modern fiction increase this year. A number of writers, including James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Bloch, are honored with book-length studies or a number of individual essays. Ann Petry, Ayn Rand, Isaac Rosenfeld, and A. B. Guthrie Jr. are the subjects of substantial biographies. The fiction of Richard Wright and Welty is the topic of special journal issues, and Katherine Anne Porter, a special journal section. The usual treatments of race, class, and gender are accompanied by a wealth of other modernist concerns: transnationalism, material culture, the role of place and social space, photography, film studies, art, mythology, Jewishness, ethnography, queer theory, science, religion, and the Gothic. Terms such as ecopastoral, postcategorical utopia, and ecophenomenology emerge and pose new challenges to readers as the modernist canon continues to expand.

i. General

A useful addition to modernist scholarship is A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900-1950, ed. John T. Matthews (Wiley), a collection of 28 essays by authors who treat a wide range of approaches to modernism and modernity, from the historical to the literary. Among the many topics considered in relation to modernism are economics, capitalism, sex and class, jazz, naturalism, regionalism, ethnicity, gender, proletarianism, domestic fiction, lesbian fiction, the gay novel, protopostmodernism, Asian American literature, film, and subgenres such as detective fiction and the western. An aim of the volume is to "extend" Peter Nicholls's notion that scholars "should be thinking more in terms of a plurality of modernisms, including a range of ethnic and mass-cultural varieties," as well as "to complicate the origins and purposes of modernism" and "to incite reconsideration, inquiry, and speculation."

A single modernist decade is the focus of Peter Conn's The American 1930s: A Literary History (Cambridge). In an effort to show the "extraordinary intellectual range" of that decade, Conn treats a main concern of 1930s writers, their "extensive and complex engagement with the past, in myriad forms: the memoirs and biographies of influential individuals, and the factual and imaginary histories of the United States and other nations." Contrary to popular belief, Conn contends, leftist politics and aesthetics did not dominate the American 1930s; rather the United States was "a place of enormous ideological and imaginative complexity, and the uses to which writers put the past can assist in recovering the heterogeneity of intellectual life in the decade." After a brief discussion of 1920s authors, Conn considers a plethora of modernist writers: those who turned to the past, such as James Agee, Margaret Ayer Barnes, and Josephine Winslow Johnson; those who wrote historical fiction, such as Walter D. Edmonds, Kenneth Roberts, and Esther Forbes; those who preferred biographies and autobiographies, including Carl Van Doren, Pearl S. Buck, and Gertrude Stein; those who explored the South, among them Allen Tate, William Faulkner, and Margaret Mitchell; those who explored racism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, and Langston Hughes; and those who considered "history and the party line," such as Clifford Odets and John Dos Passos. Also touched on are the many historical figures, organizations, and events that inspired these writers.

ii. Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck and Ann Petry

In "'Written in Disorder': John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle and 'The Big Strike'" (Genre 42: 33-60) Will Watson examines Steinbeck's "breakthrough novel of strikes and labor violence in the context of the largest, most memorable strike in California history: the San Francisco waterfront, maritime and general strike of 1934."

A significant addition to Ann Petry scholarship is Elisabeth Petry's At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry (Miss.), an intimate account of Petry's life and writing by her only child. Using snippets from her mother's journals, speech notes, and letters and her own recollections, Elisabeth Petry pens a captivating portrait of a writer who avoided publicity and rejected the notion of a published biography during her lifetime. Topics include Ann Petry's childhood, her encounters with racism, her work as a pharmacist, her marriage to George D. Petry, her extensive library, her "obsession with possessions," her...