The Cambridge History of American Literature

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction Sacvan Bercovitch and Jonathan Fortescue
I. A cultural history of the modern American novel David Minter: Prologue
Part I. A Dream City, Lyric Years, and a Great War:
1. The novel as ironic reflection
2. Confidence and uncertainty in The Portrait of a Lady
3. Lines of expansion
4. Four contemporaries and closing of the west
5. Chicago's 'Dream City'
6. Frederick Jackson Turner in the dream city
7. Henry Adams's Education and the grammar of progress
8. Jack London's career and popular discourse
9. Innocence in the 'Lyric Years':
1900–1916
10. The Armory Show of 1913 and the decline of innocence
11. The play of hope and despair
Part II. Fiction in a Time of Plenty:
12. When the war was over: the return of detachment
13. The 'Jazz Age' and the 'Lost Generation' revisited
14. The perils of plenty, or how the Twenties acquired a paranoid tilt
15. Disenchantment, flight, and the rise of professionalism in an age of plenty
16. Class, power, and violence in a new age
17. The fear of feminization and the logic of modest ambitions
18. Marginality and authority/race, gender and region
19. War as metaphor: the example of Ernest Hemingway
Part III. The Fate of Writing During the Great Depression:
20. The discovery of poverty and the return of commitment
21. The search for 'culture' as a form of commitment
22. Three responses: the examples of Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, and John Dos Passos
23. Cowboys, detectives and other tough-guy antinomians: residual individualism and hedged commitments
24. The search for shared purpose: struggles on the left
25. Documentary literature and the disarming of dissent
26. The southern renaissance: forms of reaction and innovation
27. History and novels/novels and history: the example of William Faulkner
II. Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance Rafia Zafar:
1. A new Negro?
2. Black Manhattan
3. Avatars and Manifestos
4. At home and homeless in Harlem
5. New Negro, New Woman
6. Thurman and Nugent
7. Minor writers
8. Hurston and Wright
9. Black Modernism
III. Ethnic Modernism Werner Sollors: Introduction
1. Gertrude Stein and 'Negro Sunshine'
2. Ethnic lives and 'lifelets'
3. Ethnic themes, modern themes
4. Mary Antin: progressive optimism against odds
5. Who is 'American'?
6. American languages
7. 'All the past we leave behind'? Ole E. Rølvaag and the immigrant trilogy
8. Modernism, ethnic labeling
and the quest for wholeness: Jean Toomer's new American race
9. Freud, Marx, hard-boiled
10. Hemingway spoken here
11. Henry Roth: ethnicity, modernity, and modernism
12. The clock, the salesman and the beast
13. Was modernism anti-totalitarian
14. Facing the extreme
15. Grand central terminal.

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