Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

A growing trend in scholarship is to examine texts from disciplinary/theoretical perspectives that at first might seem unusual but nevertheless provide new layers of understanding—for example, reading Jack London, Zora Neale Hurston, and María Cristina Mena through speculative/science fiction theories, Dashiell Hammett and Wallace Thurman primarily as modernists, and Gertrude Stein and Upton Sinclair through food studies. Stein continues to provide much fodder for scholars, as shown in a special section of Modernism/Modernity on Stein, history, and language. The South Atlantic Review presents a special issue on Nella Larsen to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the publication of Passing. Book-length collections of essays that examine authors' politics as well as their writing are becoming more common, with ones this year on Djuna Barnes, Pearl Buck, and W. E. B. Du Bois. H. P. Lovecraft, despite the censure he receives for his racist views, continues to attract scholars from approaches as varied as religious, ecocritical, and romantic. There is also increased scholarly interest in detective and mystery stories as literature, so this year a new subhead is added, "Mystery/Pulp Fiction and Popular Culture."

i Naturalism

Two essays look at Jack London through a science fiction lens. Christoph Bartsch's "Escape into Alternative Worlds and Time(s) in Jack London's The Star Rover," pp. 179–200 in Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan, ed., Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology (Nebraska), uses possible worlds theory to argue for a new reading of this little-studied novel. The protagonist, Darrell Standing, is a prisoner on death row who escapes into some of the previous lives of his immortal soul and spends what seems to be far more time in those lives than in the prison of his body. Most readings argue that these "escapes" are hallucinations resulting from the torture he experiences, but Bartsch contends that these astral journeys of Standing's, in which his spirit but not his body travels back in time to earlier versions of himself, could be true visits to his soul's past. In "The Intuition of the Revolutionary Artist in The Iron Heel" (Journal of Popular Culture 52: 199–210) Thomas Ray Garcia argues that London's novel is true speculative fiction because it merges socialist propaganda with a vision of an alternative future.

Hsuan L. Hsu's "Paleo-narratives and White Atavism, 1898–2015" (ISLE 26: 296–323) explores the social functions of paleo-narratives at the beginning of both the 20th and 21st centuries, contrasting Frank Norris's Moran of the Lady Letty (1898) and London's The Call of the Wild (1903) with The Paleo Diet (2002) and Born to Run (2009). In juxtaposing industrial-era novels and health manuals, Hsu makes clear that these texts create an imaginary structure that resolves anxieties about the modern world by making it simpler, wilder, and often whiter.

ii High Modernism

Modernist Communities Across Cultures and Media, ed. Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson (Florida), explores modernist experiments with community from the late-19th century through the mid-20th century, through the topics of collective experiments, communal identities, cosmopolitan communities, and communities across new media. Three essays in particular are germane to this chapter. Jeremy Braddock's "The Scandal of a Black Ulysses: Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and the Harlem Reception of Joyce" (pp. 25–45), a reworked essay that first appeared in ELH two years ago (see American Literary Scholarship [AmLS] 2017, p. 286) studies the Black bohemian intellectuals who called themselves the "Niggeratti" as early discerning readers of James Joyce's Ulysses, looking at how the novel "represented the complex politics of the minority literary revival." Braddock reads Thurman's roman à clef Infants of Spring (1933) and Nugent's Gentleman Jigger (written in the early 1930s but not published until 2008) as iterations of this literary collective, which criticized and celebrated the Black avant-garde. Christine Savinel's "Gertrude Stein's Autobiographical Communities" (pp. 106–21) analyzes both The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody's Autobiography as communal autobiographies that transcend personal histories by having a more general creative voice. The...