“Hollywood Signs” begins by observing a convergence in the fields of film and media studies and modernist studies that makes possible a novel synthesis that Classical Hollywood, American Modernism exemplifies. At the same time that scholars in cinema studies supplemented the concept of the “studio system” with attention to the industry’s social organization and an embrace of film interpretation, literary scholars undertook an analogous effort, finding in the institutional conditions in which literature is written and read the basis for a hermeneutics. This compatibility serves as the basis for this book’s approach of construing experiments in literary form as responses to conditions within the Hollywood studio system. The introduction concludes by briefly demonstrating the analytical payoff of this new synthesis in a reading of Ralph Barton and Anita Loos’s understudied film Camille; or, the Fate of a Coquette (1926).

This chapter examines the rise of trauma theory as a prevalent cultural and critical concept in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Key critiques of the concept – both in terms of its clinical and cultural dominance – are considered, particularly of its Western biases, and of the self-reinforcing bodies of trauma literature and criticism. The second half of the chapter considers a range of American trauma texts, with a particular focus on the work of Toni Morrison. These novels are examined for their complicated relationship to dominant theories of trauma representation, and for the way trauma texts increasingly respond to broader contemporary cultural and social concerns, including global warming.

This chapter sketches the history of movement conservatism’s impact on American literature from the 1950s to the present. Midcentury conservatives, in their war against an intelligentsia that they perceived as dominated by liberal voices, evolved a model of counter-expertise that continues to inform right-wing intellectual practice today. This model was influenced by midcentury disciplinary conflicts between literature and the social sciences, with conservatives affirming a literary model of truth against the rationalism of social scientific discourse. Focusing on writers who published in the book review section of National Review, this chapter shows how the idea of conservative counter-expertise attracted critics and fiction writers such as Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Garry Wills. However, the conservative critique of the liberal intelligentsia was in the process of turning into a critique of expertise as such; this critique pushed many of these writers away from the magazine and helped fashion the version of the left/eight divide that defines American politics today.

This Introduction surveys the long, inextricable relationship between American politics and the American novel in the twentieth century. After defining twentieth-century “politics” broadly as the theoretical intersection between power, freedom, and justice within the framework of American liberalism, it explains why the American novel is a unique aperture through which to view political conflict and change, arguing that the novel form illuminates how official power relations overlap with personal power relations. While surveying previous scholarship on American politics and the novel, it explains why the volume does not restrict itself to the narrow subgenre of “political fiction.” The Introduction then addresses the rationale for each major section: “Ideologies and Movements,” “The Politics of Genre and Form,” and “Case Studies.” It concludes by considering how a robust engagement with the politics of the twentieth-century American novel can help us make sense of our political present.

This chapter examines the common forms and themes of American dramatists and theater practitioners in the early twentieth century. The primary visual characteristic of plays by the Provincetown Players, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Zora Neal Hurston, and Thornton Wilder is a realistically depicted dwelling-place precariously nested within a larger, stylized evocation of the natural world. While the dwelling is most often a house, it can also be a boat, a back garden, a Pullman car, a wooded clearing, or even a street corner.  In these dwelling-places, what is social and natural, or artificial and real, remains distinct, but merges at the borders of both the stage and the stage dwelling. By depicting a domestic interior vainly fortified against a natural yet also theatrical exterior, American dramatists make compelling drama and theater out of the boundary between human and inhuman. I call this genre of American drama “fragile realism.”

The short story became a popular form among twentieth-century working-class writers, who faced challenges in maintaining a literary career while short on time and energy. Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Raymond Carver, and Bobby Ann Mason also found the short story to be an effective form for representing the experiences of those who were alienated within US society. This chapter argues that the comparably abrupt and disconnected nature of the short story parallels an aesthetic of disconnectedness that is prevalent in the work of these four writers, each of whom portrays working-class life as alienated from the mainstream culture, and whose characters are often emotionally stunted as a result. While the later writings of Carver and Mason reduce the earlier emphasis on economics and class struggle found in Olsen and, especially, Le Sueur, they all share a sense of the emotional damage caused by being working class in the United States.

This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).

The “occult world,” or occulture, is a term that has developed a very wide meaning in modern academic discourse. The full panoply of occult thinking is enormous. While always mindful of the broader definition of the subject, this essay is largely limited to what the author believes would be an acceptable vernacular definition of the occult as essentially referring to black magic, and most especially to the satanic. This has been a subject with enormous resonance for American history and culture. The argument in this chapter is that Satan has played, and continues to play, a central – and on occasion a decisive – role in American cultural and political life. He is a figure deeply in the American grain, a vivid and personal presence in the lives of many millions of Americans, given powerful and recurring embodiment in American popular culture, in particular. But he is also a presence centrally informing some of the classic works of American literature.

This essay examines the importance of unoriginality in nineteenth-century American literature, showing how imitation and conventionality affirmed writers’ respectability and provided important legitimizing credentials. By way of illustration, this essay considers the career of Washington Irving, who presented himself as a guardian of literary tradition and repeatedly narrated the virtues of allowing the past to shape the future. As Irving’s career evidences, nineteenth-century readers did not particularly prize originality but instead found value in the familiar and conventional.

This essay situates the rise of US empire in the nineteenth century within a longer, transnational, and transoceanic colonial project that has been continuously catastrophic – from the arrival of Columbus to the threats of climate change and nuclear disaster – for both Indigenous societies and nonhuman ecosystems. The essay shows how such ecological and geopolitical disruptions were central to both US nation-building and the development of an American national literature, while at the same time highlighting the causal relation and essential continuity between the extractive enterprises and imperial expansionism of the early United States and the planetary crises of the twenty-first century.

The antebellum era saw an epochal shift in politics: nature transformed into a key site of the political. No longer seen as a refuge from human concerns, biological existence itself became a key new resource for conceptualizing human difference and an administrative target of political power. This essay reveals sentimental literature to march in step with this shift. This mode overwhelmingly associated with the domestic realm and even the trite and saccharine nonetheless reveals an emergent biopolitics attuned to disciplining the individual’s nature and conceiving of humanity as a population whose biological quality could be optimized. An ideology that sutured literature and science together in an era in which divisions between them were just beginning to form, sentimentalism helped move politics into the flesh.

This essay offers an overview of major themes, texts, and critical approaches to early African American print culture. It traces movements in early nineteenth-century African American print culture from the founding of Freedom’s Journal and publication of David Walker’s Appeal through the proliferation of pseudonymous writing in Frederick Douglass’s Paper and the work of the colored conventions movement. In addition, this essay examines the ethics animating the field itself with special attention to new digital humanities projects.

This essay offers a brief overview of the sentimental novel in the United States, with a focus on its role in the abolitionist movement. While delineating its conventions, the essay also challenges the conventional view of enslaved and free blacks presented by sentimentality.

This essay places the life and writings of Catharine Maria Sedgwick beside those of her contemporary, the Pequot preacher and author William Apess. Sedgwick’s novel Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts and many of her other writings reinforced the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” and yet native communities persisted in New England in Sedgwick’s own time. By reading Sedgwick and Apess alongside one another, this essay explores white historical fiction’s role in perpetuating settler colonial ideology and highlights Apess’s strategies of rhetorical and literary resistance. In his autobiography, his collection of native conversion narratives, his published sermons, and his political writings, Apess consistently recognized, embraced, and proclaimed not only his own worth as a native man but the survival and sovereignty of native New England communities both past and present.

This essay charts the rise of serial fiction from sensational to sentimental series. Many of these texts were written by authors who were once well known but who are now largely forgotten. Or scholars may be familiar with one or two titles from these writers’ whole corpus, as may be the case for E. D. E. N. Southworth’s fifty-two novels. Publishers such as Peterson’s and Street & Smith profited from these novels, as did the authors who engaged their readers with popular, if sometimes convoluted, plots. Drawing these readers to serials was the reliability of their narrative repetitions and excitement of their psychological dramas over how to deal with transitions in US culture.