A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature: An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation

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This book re-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.

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. 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 ejection of the past ature, and the violence of the institutionalised, 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.

Reviews

Hogue provides an accessible, well-argued and well-researched analysis of modernist US fiction as a resonating chamber for the growing inequalities that shaped modern America. Focusing on both canonical and less canonical texts from The Great Gatsby to Younghill Kangs East Goes West, the books extensive close readings flesh out social and political counternarratives that decades of critical neglect have flattened out and incorporated into mainstream, inert readings of US history. Christian Moraru, Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of American Literature and Critical Theory, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature offers readers a unique rearticulation of modern American history and literature, studying novels written by a diverse group of writers. This monumental book celebrates America as a space of cross-alliances that embraces alternative modes of social ordering in the United States. E. Lle Demirtrk, Professor of African American Literature, Bilkent University, Turkey

W. Lawrence Hogues A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature energizes the prevalent discourses on American modernism by examining the competing and diverse cacophony of literary voices emerging with the plurality of political, social and economic movements and organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. The result is an expanded understanding of the historical circumstances underpinning modern literature as well as a more comprehensive vision of that literature. Connecting race, ethnicity, class and gender in a theoretically astute critical assessment, this study brilliantly recalibrates the impact of state apparatuses and global politics on the literary production and artistic methodologies of culturally diverse authors not frequently placed together but whose combined presence contributed to the making of modernism. Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Author Bio

W. Lawrence Hogue is the John and Rebecca Moores Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Houston and the author of many books, including The African American Male, Writing, and Difference (2003), Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (2009), and Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives (2013).