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  • Fiction:The 1930s to the 1960s
  • Catherine Calloway

Modernist scholars treat a number of writers most central to the canon. As in 2016, book-length studies are popular, especially collections, with John Steinbeck, James Agee, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, and H. P. Lovecraft each the topic of a gathering of critical essays, Ray Bradbury a critical story edition, Agee a volume of film criticism, and Frank Waters a book of letters. The Beat movement and Saul Bellow are honored with Cambridge Companions and Steinbeck with a long overdue volume of East European translations. Ralph Ellison, Nabokov, Lovecraft, and Southern women writers are the topics of monographs. The FBI files of James Baldwin and Pearl S. Buck are of interest to scholars along with such usual topics as Cold War culture, race, religion, photography, comparative studies, cinema, ecology, gender, rhetoric, and pedagogy. As in recent years, proletarians, Southern writers, and expatriates and émigrés continue to dominate much of the critical debate on modern fiction.

i General

Several authors germane to this chapter are treated in Sam V. H. Reese's The Short Story in Midcentury America: Countercultural Form in the Work of Bowles, McCarthy, Welty, and Williams (LSU), an examination of "how American writers used the confined, unspoken aesthetics of the [short story] form as a way of speaking out about freedom and open expression." Devoting a chapter each to Paul Bowles, Mary McCarthy, [End Page 291] Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams, four figures who were well known as short story writers during the 1940s and 1950s, Reese "trace[s] the origins of the short story's critical exile, and its relationship to the kinds of political narratives that these authors sought to critique." Especially important is the fact that these specific authors were involved with other aesthetic pursuits besides writing. Williams, for instance, was a playwright, McCarthy a reviewer and memoirist, Bowles a classical composer, and Welty a photographer. Reese discusses "the containment culture of Cold War America" and its effect on these four writers, who offer "alternative perspectives, new literary trajectories, and different ways of seeing" in their countercultural fiction as well as in postwar fiction overall. The texts of writers who are "resistant to containment culture," he posits, "should be considered part of a coherent response to the cultural pressures that demanded a literary enunciation of nationalistic values."

ii Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck

Steinbeck is honored with two books. In John Steinbeck in East European Translation: A Bibliographical and Descriptive Overview (Cambridge Scholars) Danica Čercě seeks to bridge a gap in Steinbeck's bibliographical resources by offering substantial material on his foreign publications in Eastern Europe. Čercě first "discuss[es] Steinbeck's critical fortunes in East European countries and comment[s] on the volume and quality of translations" before cataloguing the translation of Steinbeck's books, East European stage performances of his texts between the early 1940s and the present, and sound recordings. Especially important is the documentation of Steinbeck's publications in postcommunist countries such as the former Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in addition to Albania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the former German Democratic Republic. An entire section is devoted to publications in Slovenia, including critical material on Steinbeck as well as Steinbeck's work that appeared in magazines and newspapers. With the exception of places of publication, the bibliographic data has been translated into English. Luchen Li provides an introduction. Barbara Heavilin's Critical Insights: Of Mice and Men (Salem) gathers 15 essays on Steinbeck's novella. Designed to offer new readings of a well-known text, the essays treat a variety of topics, including intellectual disability, racism and race, morality, human choice, the [End Page 292] novella's reception in Eastern Europe, homosocial friendship, masculinity, marginalization, Sophoclean allusions, and pedagogy. Heavilin contributes three essays and places the novella in its political, cultural, and literary contexts. The volume concludes with a section of resources that contains a chronology of Steinbeck's life, a chronology of his works, and a selected bibliography. In "Steinbeck's Migrants: Families on the Move and the Politics of Resource Management" (MFS 63: 502–23) Bryan Yazell discusses the ways The Grapes of Wrath and The Harvest Gypsies...

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