American Fiction, 1865 1940

Brian Lee’s study of American fiction from 1865 to 1940 draws on a wealth of material by, amongst others, Twain, James, Dreiser, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Though the works of these writers have been closely scrutinised by postwar critics in Europe and America, few attempts have yet been made to utilise the new critical approaches and theories in the service of literary history. Brian Lee does so in this book, relating the writers of the period – both major and minor – to its patterns of immense economic, social and intellectual change. The first part of the book deals with a period of unprecedented industrial development between the Civil War and 1900. This was made possible by a massive population explosion which necessitated a radical change in life styles. The literary consequences of these changes were the rise of Realism and Naturalism, the growing impact of the cities – New York, Chicago, San Francisco – on late nineteenth-century fiction, and the decline of the rural communities as documented by the local colour writers. The second half of the book follows these trends, but examines how they were affected by the spread of International Modernism. Technological innovation, the communications explosion, and the growth of Hollywood; all contributed to the special character of American fiction in the early twentieth century.