Abstract
Demonstrates how the young leftist Dos Passos hoped, during World War I, that a collapse of the bourgeoning American empire might be a boon for the American literature he scorned, just as Spain’s imperial loss in 1898 had been for its writers. This chapter situates his work against his own father’s celebrations of “Anglo-Saxon” empire and against his fellow socialist, anti-imperialist, and Hispanophile William Dean Howells’s readings of American literature’s rise and of Spanish realist novels. His contribution, then, is to reduce and unravel “American literature” by using Spain’s imperial decline and literary rise as its comparative foil, a tactic that he ends up reversing in Spain in 1937 when he effects his turn to the political right of US nationalism.
Published Version
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