A Companion to Twentieth‐Century United States Fiction

Reviewer(s):

Terry O'Brien (Deputy Librarian, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland)

Citation:

Terry O'Brien, (2011) "A Companion to Twentieth‐Century United States Fiction", Reference Reviews, Vol. 25 Iss: 1, pp.31 - 33

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09504121111103155

Downloads:

The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 80 times since 2011

Keywords:

Fiction, Twentieth century, United States of America

Review Number:

2011/21

Review Subject:

A Companion to Twentieth‐Century United States Fiction Edited by David Seed

Publisher Name:

Wiley‐Blackwell

Place of Publication:

Malden, MA and Oxford

Publication Year:

2010

ISBN:

978 1 4051 4691 3

Price:

£110 $199.95

Type:

Review

Review DOI:

10.1108/09504121111103155

Emerald Journal:

Reference Reviews

Volume:

25

Number:

1

Year:

2011

pp.

31 - 33

ISSN:

0950-4125

Publisher:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Article

A Companion to Twentieth‐Century United States Fiction is the 64th volume in the well‐established Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series. Edited by David Seed, Professor of American Literature at the University of Liverpool, it features over 50 contributions from mostly professors of American literature, English, fiction and American studies from around the world. This is a reference work aimed at students of “modern” American literature and fiction, covering a diverse range of subjects and writers. In the brief introductory essay, the editor writes of the difficulty in defining the “national epithet” American. There is a brief discussion on what American means, on a geographic level of course it refers to the United States, but in so many other ways the term evokes ambiguity and debate. Its meaning is multilayered, in literature terms often ironic, exclusive or elitist. Although as Seed writes, “American sometimes functions as a hegemonic term concealing different cultural groups”, what some perceive as American and what American means to others can be radically different. Toni Morrison for example saw African Americans as existing in the shadows of American literature and asserted that “American means white”. This may lead one to the conclusion that what has often been referred to as (and the no doubt too frequently used concept of) The Great American Novel is in reality an impossibility. William Carlos Williams (1923) and Philip Roth (1973) poked at this notion in their respectively same titled novels. What is not in doubt is that American fiction continues to “open (sic) up fields of contestation, social or political”.

Some of the ongoing traditions of twentieth century American fiction are alluded to, most notably the connection between reportage and fiction manifested most notably by Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Capote and Mailer, as is the growing importance of cinema and film culture throughout the century. Seed also describes the relationship between the novelist and the nation as a “consistently tense one” but intimates that the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes (Novel 1918, Fiction 1948) represented an “important act of institutionalization”. The introductory essay also refers to a number of underlying themes such as fluidity – of the novel, of American language and indeed of genres. The resistance (not just specific to American writers) to limiting the forms of fiction and of being classified is ongoing. The fluidity of the American language is reflected in a “strong tradition of the vernacular... growing out of an abiding skepticism toward literary formality... and sense of the sheer variety of U.S. society”.

Although academic in tone, this volume is a readable and accessible work that because of its considerable chronological range and literary diversity, does not delve too deeply. Each genre essay is about 12 pages in length, the essays on specific writer's slightly shorter, ranging from between eight and ten pages. All contain suggestions for further reading. Part 1 comprises a series of essays on 16 genres and subject areas, and these are worth listing: Modernism, The City Novel, The Western, Postmodern Fiction, Modern Gothic, The Short Story, Southern Fiction, Jewish American Fiction, Modern African American, Detective Fiction, Hard‐Boiled/Noir Fiction, Chicano, Black Humor, Vietnam War, Rediscovery of the Native American, Trash Fiction. Each genre gets a critical overview, outlining the main contributions and debates within that area. The Short Story, for example, described by Frank O'Connor as an American “national art form” is traced from the rich tradition of Poe and Melville, through the mainstream publications in the 1920's and 1930's in which the likes of Scott Fitzgerald and Faulkner regularly published. The works of Dorothy Parker, Steinbeck, Richard Wright through to the comic and powerful works of Flannery O'Connor are sketched, as are writers with more markedly ethnic perspectives such as Bernard Malamud (Jewish American) and James Baldwin (African American). More recently Raymond Carver is seen as a foremost late century exponent of the realist tradition in American short story fiction. The pre‐eminence of the Jewish American genre in twentieth century literature as remarked upon by Martin Amis (1993) “the twentieth century novel... belongs to Jewish Americans” and this is difficult to argue against with the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Library of Congress Living Legend awards and Nobel Prize going to Jewish authors on multiple occasions since the 1950's. The works of Saul Bellow, Malamud and Philip Roth are characterized by their treatment of Jewishness and Jewish themes in modern America whereas for others such as Norman Mailer these are much less a concern. The piece on Hard‐Boiled/Noir Fiction a distinctly American approach to crime fiction, is dominated by Hammett and Chandler, and is seen in stark contrast to the traditional aloof British detective such as Sherlock Holmes.

Part II consists of introductory treatments of 37 selected writers with about eight to ten pages on each. As one would expect, the list is selective as it has to be and there are omissions (such as Richard Ford), but in the main the range is striking. From Edith Wharton (the perennially popular favourite and first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1921)) to Willa Cather, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Nabokov (“an American writer raised in Russia”), Mailer, Heller Burroughs, Updike, and Pynchon (“no contemporary writer has achieved such fame and such anonymity at the same time”), and on through Vidal, Roth, DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut (“ a great public novelist of our times”), Easton Ellis, Amy Tan, and Paul Auster, the list is varied as it is impressive and reads like a who's who of American literature.

This Companion is a valuable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in academic libraries. It is well written, scholarly, critical and wide‐ranging and is to be recommended. However, at £110 it is on the expensive side and Wiley‐Blackwell, to use that awful phrase, in the “current climate”, really should review their pricing for this type of reference item as library budgets continue to feel the squeeze.