A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

Abstract

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature reconfigures the history of modern America by showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary and political movements, levels, divisions and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book represents the modern American novel by accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity; the repression; the racial and ethnic stereotyping; the external and internal colonialism; the complication/rejection of the past/nature; and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is decentered, richer, more complex and more diverse.