Beginning in the late 1920s, MGM usurped Paramount’s position as the most profitable and prestigious studio, largely as a result of the oversight of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. Thalberg helped develop the corporate personality of MGM – the MGM “Idea” – comprising a glamorous and slick house style, the prioritization of stars, and a system of scriptwriting that involved assigning multiple writers to work on the same project yet often unbeknownst to each other. It is in response to this last phenomenon that authors of very disparate sensibilities – F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon [1941]), Aldous Huxley (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939]), and William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) – crafted narratives in a form I call “MGM Modernism”: an aestheticized and self-conscious naturalism developed in part from contact with and subordination to a corporate author.

This chapter covers literary representations of prostheses in a wide range of historical periods to outline the difference that literature can make in challenging the dominant technological narrative and reframing it in terms of human uses. Taking as emblematic a pair of short stories by William Faulkner (“The Leg”) and Flannery O’Connor (“Good Country People”), Hall argues that these works do more than simply register shifts in prosthetic technology, but also challenge normalizing discourses through forms that “resist any urge toward stable order, whether narrative, social, or bodily.” “Language and storytelling are important to our understanding of prosthesis,” Hall argues, “because anxieties, hopes, and fantasies about enablement, modification, and enhancement, as well as the powerful fiction of the ‘normate,’ are reinforced but also renegotiated in literary and cultural spaces.”

While new modernist scholars are generally keen to recover and integrate the tradition’s marginalized voices, its implements for doing so remain relatively crude. As some critics have argued, the “pluralizing of modernisms” is not sufficient without a more granular accounting of the mutually constitutive developments of race/racism and modernism writ large. More supple instruments for reading race into modernism have thus acknowledged settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the underlying, instigating features of both modernity as a historical process and modernism as the intellectual and cultural responses to inhabiting its conditions and institutions. Summoning Indigeneity into modernism’s operations frameworks forces us to read against the typical grain of alterity, resistance, or transcendence. This chapter surveys the state of such field-shifting projects while arguing for further innovations that would more radically place – and deconstruct – the idea of “Indigeneity” within the crucible of modernism.

This chapter traces the reappearance of key features of literary modernism – especially narrative foretelling and the archival sleuth – in South Asian dictator fiction. It reveals that several techniques credited to Anglo-American modernists became “revenants” in South Asia through affiliative movement toward an unacknowledged middle generation in Latin America. Mohammad Hanif, joined by Salman Rushdie and Mohsin Hamid, portray the specter of political violence in Pakistan by adapting some of the most recognizable traits that boom superstars Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa developed out of their own readings of the North American modernist William Faulkner. Modernist narrative complexity has often been cast as apolitical or even reactionary. In contrast, South Asian authors suggest that such styles undo the easy certainties the dictator offers and uses language to challenge him on the grounds of the literal power to “dictate.” At the same time, Hanif and others use revenant structures to manage the “overheard” quality of writing in English – that is, as a way of addressing two totally distinct audiences at once.

This chapter surveys Ellison’s complex relationship with other key Modernist writers, as expressed both explicitly in his letters and chapters, and implicitly in his short stories, in Invisible Man, and in Three Days Before the Shooting … . Examining key moments in his intellectual formation, such as his encounters with Eliot and Joyce during his undergraduate studies at Tuskegee, it also maps out the paradox of his attested admiration for but rare intertextual dialogue with Hemingway, and his ambivalent and shifting positions on Faulkner. Lastly, it suggests that despite Ellison’s and Morrison’s mutual and clearly voiced antipathy, these two writers have far more in common, particularly in terms of their conceptions of Modernism, than either would like to admit. Throughout my overview, I will take account of the best pre-existing scholarship on this subject.

This chapter explores the significance of Gothic to an emergent American modernist aesthetic, surveying a range of current theories of Gothic and focusing particularly on the legacies of slavery and the politics of segregation in the American South, but also evoking other historical traumas. European modernism is conventionally understood largely to have disavowed Gothic romance; by contrast, under the influence of William Faulkner and others, the particular strand of fiction associated with the Southern Literary Renaissance developed Gothic motifs into a distinctive idiom through which to explore themes of otherness and difference and to reflect on the significance of the individual and collective past, in depictions both disavowing and incorporating everyday deviance amid a society of social taboos against miscegenation, incest, homosexuality that were everywhere symbolically enforced though commonly violated in practice. In doing so, and in developing an ambivalent, paradoxical body of writings that might best be described as ‘modernist regional Gothic’, such writers as Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor took Gothic in a radically new direction.

Scholars of both American and U.S. southern history have turned attention to the Indigenous traces often overlooked at the dark heart of place-making. Such revisionism has proved no easy feat in the South, a place where “real” Indians are presumed to be largely extinct after the sweeping Removal land-clearing policies of the 1830s. Nonetheless, Indigenous traces linger – preserved indelibly in the region’s place names, cultural memories, and compensatory fictions. Especially in southern literature, Native hauntings appear to speak for themselves; but they are also uncannily, frighteningly reticent: “vanish’d,” “incomprehensible,” and “inexplicable.” As vital precursors to a traumatic regional history – their expulsion directly facilitating the rise of the South’s plantation economy – this chapter suggests that their centrality can be neither fully recovered nor reckoned with. Indeed, for southerners from a surprising range of backgrounds and moments, the Indian endures as a consistent, formative presence central to the region’s fictions of identity.

This chapter considers how a range of U.S. southern writers with varying political views responded to the Depression and New Deal. It stresses that even when competing visions of and for the South were articulated by different “fronts” in the period’s “cultural wars,” such visions were not always reducible to left versus right, communism versus capitalism, or “Agrarian versus Industrial.” William Faulkner’s short fiction between 1941 and 1943 reveals complex, contradictory attitudes toward the New Deal, especially the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The writing of Zora Neale Hurston, including texts produced for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project, includes a critique of Jim Crow labor exploitation comparable to the work of her supposed antagonist (and fellow FWP author) Richard Wright. Arna Bontemps’s historical novels, especially Black Thunder (1936), approach Depression-era social upheaval allegorically by depicting earlier black laborers revolting against slavery in the U.S. South and the Caribbean.

This chapter examines the notion of home-shock (as opposed to shell-shock) in five works of American fiction from the 1920s. Each work contains a veteran tortured not by war but by the circumstances of his homecoming. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby returns from his heroic overseas service to a nation that seems content to let him starve, the pivotal moment in his transformation from earnest student of self-help to criminal bootlegger. Harold Krebs, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” is infantilized by his mother and ignored by his community, which neither understands nor respects his combat experience. Bayard Sartoris and Henry Winston—former wartime aviators featured in, respectively, William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust and Elliott White Springs’s Leave Me with a Smile—each suffer from paralyzing survivor’s guilt, a malady that no one in their Southern settings is equipped to treat. For African-American protagonists, subject to racial violence and oppression, home-shock is even more intense, as illustrated by the ironic fate visited upon Frederick Taylor, the doleful hero of Claude McKay’s “The Soldier’s Return,” set in a small Georgia town. This former soldier winds up on a chain gang after ignoring an edict that prohibits black veterans from wearing their uniforms in public.

The First World War was a shock to the US South. When the war started, the South was a provincial region mired in segregation and plantation agriculture, much as it had been before the Civil War. During the war, however, the South mobilized. Nearly one million southerners enlisted; almost all of the nation’s troops trained at bases hastily-constructed in the South, and the war dramatically reshaped the region’s social order. The war brought northerners and southerners into contact on a massive scale, which eroded sectional animosities, it gave African Americans an opportunity to challenge Jim Crow through military service, and it offered women new forms of social, political, and economic agency. All of these changes occurred during the frenzy of wartime. In the South, the war’s full effects were not evident until after the Armistice, when the soldiers returned. The social expansions that happened during the war contracted, but like a deflated balloon misshapen from use, the social order did not return precisely to previous conditions. This essay focus on the works of three Mississippi writers—William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner, and George Washington Lee—who depicted the experiences of soldiers returning from the war and post-war social landscape of the South.

Assertions of the Civil War’s meaning began well before the formal cessation of hostilities. In poetry, prose, and oratory, Unionists and Confederates staked out claims for the legitimacy of their cause. We continue to lay out these claims well into the twenty-first century, in large measure because we cannot agree on the stakes, let alone on what they mean. Literature has played an outsized role in these conversations in part because of its popularity and accessibility. Equally important, literature has an immediacy that other genres and disciplines lack. By surveying canonical and lesser-known literary works, this essay outlines how generations of Americans have written about the war. And by highlighting narratives and counternarratives, it makes clear that alternative visions always challenged the dominance of the Lost Cause trope.

Because of its inherent multidisciplinarity and conceptual flexibility, trauma theory has, from the start, been subject to ongoing revisions and redefinitions. This essay expands the notion of trauma as resulting from unassimilable, life-threatening, past events by conceptualizing trauma as resulting from the envisaged imminent annihilation of the known world. This apocalyptic trauma is embedded in American literature and closely tied to the politics of mourning dramatized in narratives of loss and melancholia but also in narratives of political activism and regeneration. This essay discusses apocalyptic expressions related to the trauma of the loss of the culture of the Old South in William Faulkner’s work, to the trauma of dispossession and cultural erasure in Chicano/a literature, and to the trauma of envisaged global annihilation in American eco-poetry.

Most readers agree that Faulkner’s Indian characters are romanticized, if not grotesquely stereotypical; the author himself readily admitted that he “made them up.” Indeed, neither Faulkner nor his critics seem able to conceive of his Indian as anything more than a static, romantic, obsolete trope, despite the fact that Natives appeared frequently and suggestively at the margins of his world, and that they reappeared in his fiction as self-buttressing concepts sited uncannily between reality and fantasy - an imaginary supplement or alter ego that presents a compensatory and destabilizing fiction for the white southern subject. This chapter argues that we need to acknowledge how very intimate and “real” this Indian is in order to fully appreciate the significance of their symbolic transubstantiations. There are Indians hidden in plain sight throughout Faulkner’s career in ways we have hardly begun to notice, and their “disappearance” is the product of an unspoken collusion between Faulkner’s stated method and our symptomatic critical misprision. His Indians are finally there and not-there at the same time, mirroring an uncanny vacancy in the white southern ego that both desires and rejects their supplemental knowledge.

This chapter uses the work of Toni Morrison, especially Song of Solomon, to explore the racialised history of finance in America. The first section suggests that the two intertextual reference points for this novel, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, provide a telling history of those key moments in America – the 1870s, the 1930s and the 1960s – in which credit has been associated with false promise and dispossession for the African Americans. Its second section uses this context to trace the narrative of the protagonist of Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead, as he uncovers the loss that has constructed his own family history. Morrison traces this racialised history of finance, especially the self-ownership promised by insurance, to explore the particular and paradoxical crisis in the credit cultures of the 1970s. The novel reads the politics of the contemporary by returning to the old failures of both the New South and the New Deal and reckons with the persistent and still-present legacies of a credit system that was rooted in the trade in humans.

A key moment in the history of the dynamic between New Orleans and the major cultural hubs of the Northeast and Europe occurred with the emergence of a “little” magazine in 1921 called the Double Dealer, which published the literary figures who would define the aesthetic and cultural movement known as modernism. The final issues of the magazine gave significant exposure to a writer who was, until then, little known – William Faulkner. The magazine also published Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and Thornton Wilder. Though it faltered and finally folded after just a handful of years, it managed to link New Orleans to the most elite cultural channels of the wider world in roughly the same moment that the indigenous music of the city – jazz – came to widespread recognition.

Recent research by climate scientists suggest that New Orleans, much of which is below sea level and protected from the sea only by a rapidly eroding marshland, may someday become uninhabitable. The city’s literature of the last few decades has been preoccupied with the theme of fatalism and apocalypse, and the deadly epidemics of the nineteenth century have provided rich symbolic terrain for figuring the troubles that “plague” the city and that will someday mean its end. Some recent work by women of color – notably Erna Brodber and Brenda Marie Osbey – delineates a different literary project, one appropriate to a post-apocalyptic diaspora, namely the work of remembering. Both the traditional fatalism and this emerging interest in memory will likely be central themes to watch for in the major literature associated with the New Orleans in coming decades.