The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel part of the Cambridge Companions to Literature series, provides over a dozen original, analytical essays about American modernist novels and their relations to global literatures and movements. The text’s editor, Joshua L. Miller, an Associate Professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan, and author of Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Miller, 2011), introduces the volume by situating American literary modernism within cultural, social and historical contexts. Miller then goes on to provide some background on the current state of US literary modernism scholarship before briefly introducing each section and essay in the collection, foregrounding unique characteristics and viewpoints, as well as establishing their importance to the wider study of modernist literature. Credentials for each of the 13 essay contributors, all academics from universities in the USA, Canada, England and Australia, can be found at the beginning of the text, after the table of contents.
The text is divided into three thematic parts. The first, Movements, contains essays devoted to regionalism, ethnicity and race. In this section, special attention is paid to works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kathleen Tamagawa, Carlos Bulosan, H.T. Tsiang, Willa Cather, Anzia Yezierska and W.E.B. Du Bois. The second part, Methodologies, examines gender, borderlands and queering modernism, as well as the scientific imagination. This section of the text engages with the works of Pauline Hopkins, Du Bois, Mariano Azuela, Olga Beatriz Torres, Jovita Gonzalez, Americo Paredes, Henry James, Nathanael West, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein and William James. The final section, Textualities, discusses works that engage with visual culture, jazz and blues, translation, new media and American modernism’s relation to the larger world. This concluding section focuses on the work of James, Stein, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Nella Larsen, Ernest Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Henry Roth, Claude McKay, Anita Loos and Faulkner, among others.
These dense, in-depth essay treatments are each followed by a well-sourced list of explanatory and source notes. Curated lists of further readings for each essay are provided in the text’s end matter. These reading lists, comprising academic books, book chapters and articles, can function as an essential primer for readers wishing to explore any of the collection’s topics in more detail. A chronology of notable literary and historic events of the period from 1877 to 1953 is also included, which provides a helpful reference and historical context for many of the works and writers mentioned throughout the collection.
While several high-profile modernists, such as Stein and Du Bois, are covered by multiple essays in The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, the volume is also notable for its diversity of content coverage and treatment, especially in the essays devoted to Transpacific Modernisms and Borderlands Modernism. The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel assumes a certain familiarity with literary modernism and its authors, so the volume would be most appropriate for upper level literature students and scholars.
