Fiction: The 1930s to the 1960s

Of particular interest this year is the modernist tendency toward intertextuality. Scholars frequently examine the writers germane to this chapter in light of a variety of other authors, from classical to contemporary, including Sophocles, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Honoré de Balzac, Yukio Mishima, Tim Gautreaux, Thomas Pynchon, and Julian Barnes, and demonstrate that modernist writers were aware of and in some cases influenced by the works of their predecessors and contemporaries. The works of Flannery O’Connor and Vladimir Nabokov are especially popular with critics, with O’Connor the subject of four books and Nabokov seven. Substantial biographies of Ray Bradbury, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harry Harrison Kroll appear this year, as well as editions of the letters of Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and William Maxwell. James Baldwin is featured in a special section of ANQ and J. D. Salinger in a special issue of LIT. Scholarship on modern fiction writers remains steady in 2011 but with less emphasis on transnationalism, Cold War politics, and ecocritical concerns.

i Proletarians

a. John Steinbeck

In “Tear into the Guts: Whitman, Steinbeck, Springsteen, and the Durability of Lost Souls on the Road” (CRevAS 41: 223–43) Brent Bellamy explores the road metaphor in Steinbeck’s fiction in conjunction with Bruce Springsteen’s songs and Walt Whitman’s poems. The works of all three figures “pit characters, readers, and listeners against the ideology of freedom that structures road narratives and American durability.” Steinbeck’s road narrative, for instance, “mak[es] the road a place of oppression and confinement,” yet all three writers demonstrate that such oppression can be transcended by collective unity within the community.

b. James Agee

In “James Agee’s ‘Continual Awareness,’ Untold Stories: ‘Saratoga Springs’ and ‘Havana Cruise,’” pp. 225–37 in John S. Bak and Bill Reynolds, eds., Literary Journalism Across the Globe: Journalistic Traditions and Transnational Influences (Mass.), William Dow focuses on the cultural significance of Agee’s journalistic segments and short essays. Using the often overlooked 1930s Fortune magazine pieces “Saratoga Springs” and “Havana Cruise” as specific examples, Dow shows how Agee satirizes and critiques such cultural aspects as social class, corruption, prostitution, gambling, wealth, mass consumption, “the commodity of leisure,” and the popularity of cruise ship travel. Michael A. Lofaro, “Progress Priced Too Dear: Appalachia and Appalachian Pastoral in the Work of James Agee” (JoASt 17, i–ii: 85–107), considers the way that Agee renegotiates the pastoral tradition in A Death in the Family. Using such texts as “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” “Ann Garner,” “In Memory of My Father,” “Sunday: Outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee,” “Tennessee Valley Authority,” and “TVA: Work in the Valley,” Lofaro demonstrates that Agee’s most extensive use of the Appalachian pastoral occurs in his original text of A Death in the Family, restored in 2007, and that the pastoral treatment of the region is modern rather than classical in that it “depicts a zone of actual and symbolic conflict between tradition and technology, an Appalachia that is a borderlands in transition.” J. C. Hallman’s “Knoxville: Summer, 1915” (Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 13, ii: 103–08) considers Agee’s early essay “as a clarion call to the estranged family of writers, of estranged genres, here gathered to demonstrate the cycle to which language should aspire” rather than as “a relic of Agee’s estranged family” or as a superb example of a memoir. In “Rivals in Photo-Realism: James Agee vs. Margaret Bourke-White” (SoSt 18, i: 58–73) Adam Sonstegard compares the photo-prose collections of Agee and Walker Evans and Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell. According to Sonstegard, both “collections seek to reconcile photographers’ and writers’ points of view, but both struggle to privilege masculine, voyeuristic perceptions and subordinate unruly feminine figures as objects of their gaze.”

c. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes

Wright attracts the attention of several essayists. In “(Re) Claiming Legacy in the Post-Civil Rights South in Richard Wright’s ‘Down by the Riverside’ and Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old...