A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War

Author: Tim Dayton and Mark W. Van Wienen

Hardcover

This book explores American literature and culture of the First World War while analyzing the war's historical context and significance.

The collection explores the various, often conflicting representations of the war offered by US writers, artists, intellectuals, and political figures. This multidisciplinary study, a collaboration of premier scholars, serves readers and students interested in American literature, history, and politics as well as specialists in these subjects.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

This book explores American literature and culture of the First World War while analyzing the war's historical context and significance.

Description

In the years of and around the First World War, American poets, fiction writers, and dramatists came to the forefront of the international movement we call Modernism. At the same time a vast amount of non- and anti-Modernist culture was produced, mostly supporting, but also critical of, the US war effort. A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War explores this fraught cultural moment, teasing out the multiple and intricate relationships between an insurgent Modernism, a still-powerful traditional culture, and a variety of cultural and social forces that interacted with and influenced them. Including genre studies, focused analyses of important wartime movements and groups, and broad historical assessments of the significance of the war as prosecuted by the United States on the world stage, this book presents original essays defining the state of scholarship on the American culture of the First World War.

Critic Reviews

“'... offers a thorough examination of the cultural impact of a war in which the US's role is sometimes given little prominence ... this admirable volume ... goes beyond the typical Lost Generation roster of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings et al.' Alice Kelly, The Times Literary Supplement”

'… offers a thorough examination of the cultural impact of a war in which the US's role is sometimes given little prominence … this admirable volume … goes beyond the typical Lost Generation roster of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings et al.' Alice Kelly, The Times Literary Supplement
'Recommended.' T. Bonner Jr., Choice Magazine

About the Author

Tim Dayton is Professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead (2003), American Poetry and the First World War (2018), and numerous articles on American poetry and crime fiction, and historical materialist literary theory and criticism. He is leading a project to develop a digital archive of American First World War poetry. Mark W. Van Wienen is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (1997) and American Socialist Triptych (2012), the latter supported by an NEH fellowship. He has edited Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War (2002) and American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920 (2018).