Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

Scholars in early-20th-century American literature continue to find new authors to write about, often those whose work has fallen out of print or out of critical favor. Included are those who wrote for popular audiences, especially in genres such as mystery, fantasy, and science fiction, since genre fiction is now seen as a site for revealing aspects of culture, including anxieties about class and racial prejudices, in nonstandard ways. The Harlem Renaissance continues to be a site for much impressive scholarship, including two collections of novels from the Library of America.

i Naturalism: Dreiser, London, Norris

An excellent introduction to both the texts and scholarship of naturalism can be found in Donna Campbell’s “American Literary Naturalism: Critical Perspectives” (LiteratureC 8: 499–513). Campbell defines classic naturalism and its themes in the works of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London before discussing critical trends in scholarship on naturalism, including how naturalist elements have persisted throughout 20th-century literature. More recently the scholarly focus has been in four thematic groupings, “space and place, corporeality, mechanisms and technology, and lines and boundaries.”

Donald Pizer continues to play an important role in Dreiser studies, including the invaluable Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” The book brings together texts from the time, including other writings by Dreiser, information on the Chester Gillette–Grace Brown case, and a number of scholarly articles. The five sections—“The ‘American Tragedy’ Archetype,” “The Social Background,” “Composition, Publication, and Reception,” “Stage and Film Adaptations,” and “Criticism and Later History”—provide generous context for understanding the novel. Pizer’s “Evolution and American Fiction: Three Paradigmatic Novels” (ALR 43: 204–22) examines James Lane Allen’s The Reign of Law, Norris’s The Octopus, and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie as reflections of the impact of Darwinian ideas. The paradigm ranges from “Allen’s use of the subject matter of Darwinism to dramatize the conventional theme of a conflict between religious faith and doubt in a traditionally shaped novel to Norris’ adaptation of a specific evolutionary idea into a grandiose fictional structure expressive of that idea to Dreiser’s absorption of a Darwinian perspective into a radical reading of human character and action within a reconceived Bildungsroman form.”

Graham Culbertson, “Capitalist Reform: Dreiser’s The Titan and the Benefits of Competition” (StAN 6: 69–87), argues that Dreiser along with Herbert Spencer believed in the importance of “conflict among amoral forces working mechanistically to establish balance” or at least a sense of temporary equilibrium. The Titan serves as Dreiser’s most thorough illustration of this as Cowperwood and the conservative financiers are driven from power by an outraged public.

The debt Dreiser and other authors owed Emile Zola is the focus of “Nana in the World: Novel, Gender, and Transnational Form” (MLQ 72: 75–105), in which Christopher L. Hill examines Kosugi Tengai’s New Year’s Finery and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (both 1900) in detail, since both protagonists follow Nana, a sexually and economically independent woman, in rising from humble beginnings to fame on the stage and along the way negotiating social expectations regarding sex and marriage.

Florence Dore, “Guilty Reading: Obscenity Law, American Modernism, and the Case for Teaching Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie,” pp. 296–306 in Teaching Law and Literature, teaches Sister Carrie alongside Sigmund Freud’s Dora so that students will understand “the standard of feminine innocence that justified censorship law.” Contemporary critics saw Carrie as sexually corrupt, but her greater problem may be one of intellectual inferiority, so that “her shame is intellectual rather than sexual.”

Clyde’s narcissism is examined by Jillmarie Murphy, “‘Sorrow and the Weight of Sin’: Religious Obsession in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy,” pp. 131–57 in her Monstrous Kinships. Clyde is ill equipped to socialize with others of his own age or class because his parents are so caught up in religious zeal that they neglect their roles as parents. Clyde seeks validation from those he perceives as more powerful, and badly treats those he perceives as lower class, because his greatest fear is personal annihilation, a feeling of...